Tough decisions are in store again for the Chinook School Division after last March's provincial budget.

For this school year, 33.75 jobs were cut from Chinook's central office, but no teaching positions were removed.

This time around, it could be a different story.

"We are not as confident that we are going to be able to maintain our present teacher staffing levels," said Chinook's acting director of education, Kyle McIntyre.

In the 2017-18 budget, Chinook - which covers the large and relatively-sparsely-populated southwest-Saskatchewan area, including 62 schools - had to deal with a $6-million decrease in funding from the previous year. Now the school board has about $3.5 million of residual they need to find in order to balance their budget.

"We anticipate we have to make some very tough decisions about the staffing levels in our schools," McIntyre said. "What those are going to be right now? We have no idea. We're going through the data; we're looking at all sorts of possibilities to try to balance our budget. We're looking at reducing our [professional development] allocation, we're looking at some attendance-management strategies, we may be looking at how we staff our schools."

Saskatchewan Teachers' Federation President Pat Maze decried the provincial government for making the education system suffer since the March, 2017 budget. He also said while Chinook is facing "the biggest budget crunch," partly because of its large, sparsely-populated (outside of Swift Current) geographic area, plans for making big cuts are unnecessary at this stage, with the Saskatchewan Party set to elect a new leader, who will become premier.

"When you're dealing with people's lives and teachers and employees in the division get very anxious when job cuts are projected, and so it has to be handled very carefully," said Maze. "To be honest, personally I would have waited - I've seen many provinces from the leadership candidates - and so we know in a couple weeks we are going to have a new premier, and I would like to give them an opportunity to right this situation before it goes through.

"The difficult thing is the province makes these budget cuts, and then it's the poor trustees and school division staff that have to be faced with these problems when really government has to look in the mirror and see, why is it that we're shortchanging our students and shortchanging education."

Maze said a long-term strategy to overcome a provincial deficit would be better than trying to fix things in two years "so that we don't decimate the education system just so we can say in a couple years that we've fixed a deficit that really could have been fixed over four, five, or six years. And I know some of the leadership candidates have talked about that as well, that maybe it's going to take a little bit longer to fix the deficit, because if you damage the education system so much and cut it back so extensively then it becomes difficult to recreate programs down the road once times are better."

Overall, Saskatchewan's enrollment numbers are on the rise, though they've been fairly static in Chinook.

McIntyre said school closure "probably not in the books for anywhere in the province, let along Chinook," despite it being financially challenging to provide adequate staff and infrastructure for all of them. Funding goes to school divisions based on enrollment.

"One of our challenges is with a number of small schools, not every single school is filled to its capacity," said McIntyre. "But we still have a responsibility to have infrastructure costs that we can't change regardless of how many kids are in the school. So schools are funded based on the number of kids in the school; our challenge is we have a number of very small schools over a vast geographical space that doesn't advantage you from a funding perspective."

The new leader of the Saskatchewan Party will be announced January 27. The winner of the leadership race will become the next premier, which will give the public a better idea of what to expect for the education budget. The provincial budget is then set to come out March 28, which will really clear things up.