For the first time in 11 years, the Chinook School Division overspent on their facilities and maintenance budget.

They had budgeted for just above $10.81 million and eclipsed that by almost $560,000, or 5.1 per cent.

Rod Quintin, chief financial officer for the Chinook School Division, said with budget reductions and with the loss of a few maintenance staff they've had to focus more on major problems than have time to spend on making schools look better.

"We're moving more towards keeping just the critical systems and the building envelopes sound," he said. "We're not putting as much emphasis on the things like aesthetics improvements in the buildings so they slowly start to degrade over time. The buildings are safe, the roofs are good, the boilers are good, that type of stuff we're keeping on top of but there is just not the resources to spend the extra money that would make the interior surfaces look better."

Last year the maintenance team lost two full-time staff and roles for the remaining 13 maintenance staff changed a little bit.

"The removal or really great reduction in the amount of time that we've spent on playgrounds has helped because we don't spend the time with our staff on playgrounds so they're able to do something else," Quintin said. "We really had to kind of move more towards everybody being a generalist instead of them being a specialist, so whatever the job needs to be to be done, you put people on it."

The school board reported they went over budget on all three areas - operations ($315,818), amortization ($220,677), salaries and benefits ($22,773).

"We've done all the things we can do around efficiency of funding, now we have to start to look at is the funding that we're getting sufficient, and we're starting to see that getting less and less sufficient for us to be able to operate our buildings," he said. "At some point that discussion needs to happen with the ministry around sufficiency of funding."

One positive thing for the school division and their facilities is since 2005, 27 of 29 public schools have improved in their overall maintenance rating.

school rating oct12