Lunch supervision fees to go up at Regina public schools

Parents of students in the Regina Public School Division will have to reach a little deeper into their wallets in the coming school year if their kids stay at school over lunch.

The division sent a letter this week to parents and caregivers, announcing that lunchtime supervision fees will be going up in the fall to help deal with the funding shortfall from the provincial budget.

The fees for students in kindergarten will rise from $50 to $55 a year. For elementary students, fees will rise from $100 to $110 a year, and a fee of $55 a year will be introduced for high school students. There will be a cap of $220 a year per family.

“We are struggling with even getting to a status-quo situation with our budget that we received, so we have to look at our staffing levels. At that point, we have to look at where we can reduce our spending, as well as other revenue sources, and our noon-hour supervision would be an example of a revenue source,” explained Darren Boldt, director of education for the division.

Right now, Boldt said the division collects less than 20 per cent of what lunchtime supervision costs, so the division is looking to get a little more income to keep other resources in classrooms unchanged.

Boldt said schools will work with any families that can’t afford the fee, and noted he doesn’t want it to be a barrier for anyone.

Boldt said Regina Public Schools needed a three per cent increase from the 2022-23 provincial budget to be able to maintain its status quo, but only got a one per cent increase. He said the division has less funding per student now than it did in 2016.

The division is making other changes in addition to the supervision fees, including increasing class sizes in the coming year.

“We will have less staff in schools than we would have wanted to to keep our current (student-teacher ratio) the way it is,” said Boldt.

No permanent staff will be losing their jobs, however. Boldt said the division will achieve reductions by not filling vacant positions. The money for preventative maintenance was also cut by $500,000 for the coming year, according to Boldt.

“That made us look at our schedule of projects that we had upcoming, and had to push some of those off into the future,” he said.

Part of the problem for urban school divisions is the number of students they have. They’re seeing increases at the start of the year and also throughout the year – and that’s not accounted for in the funding.

Boldt explained that the division got a top-up for the 200 more students last year who enrolled before the Sept. 30 cutoff, but not for the 700 more students who enrolled after that date – enough to fill an entire school.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe and Education Minister Dustin Duncan have both said that more funding will be coming to help deal with enrolment issues before the next school year, but Boldt said that hasn’t been confirmed at this point.

“Right now, we have to operate on the funding package that we received,” he explained.

Duncan also spoke about looking at the funding system and seeing if the government needs to figure out a way to provide top-up enrolment funding through the year, a measure Boldt said would be very welcome.

The division’s final budget will be approved at a board meeting in June, and Boldt said he doesn’t anticipate having to look for any more cost-saving measures before the start of the school year.

“We’re hoping, obviously, for extra funding where we could change some of the reductions we’ve seen and perhaps put more teachers in schools, for example, but we don’t anticipate further measures like increasing in our supervision fees,” explained Boldt.

Regina Public Schools isn’t the only school division in the province having to make some changes. Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools recently announced it will be increasing supervision fees in the coming school year as well.