LAKELAND – Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS) will be finishing the 2024-25 school year with a significant deficit.
According to Nicole Garner, the communications and public relations manager for NLPS, the 2024-25 budget included a $4.7 million deficit. This deficit, she explained, was designed to maintain services levels to students and families while drawing from the school division’s reserves.
The NLPS board of trustees voted to approve the 2024-25 budget during the June 11 meeting in Lac La Biche.
“Our plan was to make cost reductions in order to have a balanced budget in 2025-26,” Garner told Lakeland This Week. “However, as we shared earlier this year, we have not received the funding we anticipated through Jordan's Principle, and our projected deficit for the year is now closer to $7 million, which will deplete our reserves and leave us in a negative financial position heading into 2025-26.”
According to information from NLPS, while the school division expects to remain below the minimum required reserves going into the next school year, the division is also predicting an $1.8 million surplus for 2025-26.
To bring its reserves closer to the minimum level required by Alberta Education, Garner said the school division will need to record a surplus next year. By ministerial order, the division is mandated to hold a minimum of one per cent, or approximately $850,000, in reserves.
During the board meeting, NLPS secretary-treasurer Paul Elock addressed the board of trustees, pointing out that it will take the school division longer than one year to replenish its reserves.
“The $1.8 million surplus anticipated for 2025-26 will help us address our accumulated deficit and bring us closer to meeting the minimum reserve requirements of one per cent,” she said.
In addition to reducing spending overall, the school division also needed to address continued inflationary costs during the board meeting, according to Garner. These costs have affected several areas within NLPS operations, including transportation, insurance, licensing, and utilities.
“We identified cost savings in several areas, including supplies, purchased services, contract services, subsistence, mileage, repairs and maintenance, and travel. Our focus was in reducing spending as much as possible in areas that do not affect staffing before making staffing reductions,” she said.
In early April, nearly 100 educational assistants and over 280 students were impacted across the NLPS district due to what the school division said were delays and uncertainty in receiving federal funding through Jordan’s Principle.
Jordan’s Principle is a federal government program that focuses on ensuring that First Nations children across Canada can access services and supports they need to be successful.
Garner said NLPS officials are still waiting to hear if the application it put in for the program will be approved, and what, if any, funding the school division might receive to offset what it spent in the 2024-25 school year.
In addition to not receiving any of the anticipated $7 million in funding through Jordan’s Principle that it had budgeted, resulting in a higher than planned deficit for the 2024-25 school year, Garner explained that for 2025-26, due to changes in Jordan’s Principle eligibility criteria, NLPS administration has not budgeted for any revenue to come from the program.
“That will impact the services that we are able to provide to our First Nations students as that is what the funding was being used for,” she said. “The board is continuing to advocate for approval of our 2024-25 Jordan's Principle application as well as clarification on changes made to the funding criteria for next year.”
