The Greater Essex County District School Board is in better financial shape than it thought it would be.
A projected deficit at the school board on the edge of what the province allows is back within acceptable limits.
The school board was expecting its deficit to hit $3.75-million for the 2016-2017 budget, but a small $1-million surplus in the previous budget has brought the deficit down to $1.5-million.
The province demands school boards keep deficits within 1% of overall budgets. The public school board spends about $418-million — meaning a deficit of $3.5-million could lead to trouble with the province.
Superintendent of Business and Treasurer Cathy Lynd says 500 more elementary students than expected on top of staff retirements helped improve the bottom line.
"This is certainly a better position than we were in in the spring with the original budget," says Lynd. "It puts us in a better spot going forward to not make drastic decisions."
Director of Education Erin Kelly says through the financial pressures, student programming hasn't suffered, pointing to the launch of a new International Baccalaureate diploma program.
"You have to have good programming to attract students, so of course that's a decision that has to be made," says Kelly. "We believe that investing in this would be a good opportunity for our students and potentially increase our enrollment."
Kelly adds despite an improved bottom line, there are still financial challenges including special education needs, aging infrastructure and empty school spaces.
"We have budget pressures that we still continue to address and we will continue to be most efficient with our resources that we can and we recognized on a go forward [basis] we're going to have to continue the good scrutiny of our financial situation," says Kelly.
The board was also able to realize $1.4-million in savings a year by negotiating a remedy with custodians for post-retirement benefits on top of extending the payment of those benefits from six to 12 years.
Consultation on the next budget begins in April.