Sask. education minister says schools need to start finding savings

Saskatchewan's education minister says he will be looking to school divisions to start reducing their administrative costs as the government works to get the budget balanced by next year.

Don Morgan says conversations between divisions, the province's teachers' federation and others will need to start now — and like government, he says they should leave nothing off the table.

"The challenge that I would say to all the school divisions is sit down with a blank sheet of paper and say, 'How many things can we share with another school division? Can we do a common set of payroll? Can we do things where we have common buying. How many superintendents do we really need? Can we have the principals do more of the management, more of the administration?"

Opposition concerned

The Opposition's Carla Beck was a school trustee in Regina's public school division until she was elected an NDP MLA.

She says administrative costs are just a fraction of the money spent by the Regina public school board.

"Governance only represents three per cent of the budget," Beck said. "Upwards of 86 per cent of budgets within education go to front-line services and plant — actually keeping the buildings going."

Meanwhile, she says the government is increasing the budget for K-12 education by such a relatively small amount that divisions will not be able to keep up with expenses.

"Teachers contracts, SaskPower increases — we all know what inflation is and the impact on future budgets," said Beck. "This miniscule increase will not meet the current needs in our classrooms."

Teacher contracts on the table

The minister says there is room to improve.

"I haven't seen from any of the school divisions a real reduction in the number of administration staff that they have," Morgan said.

Morgan also wants locally-negotiated agreements between divisions and teachers to be reviewed.

Those contracts cover items not included in the province-wide contract negotiated for all teachers in Saskatchewan — including leave provisions, and preparation time and are negotiated separately in each division.

In this year's budget, those agreements are worth $137 million in total.

"Now with the joint-use schools you'll have teachers in the same school that'll have a different contract and that's something that we need to address," Morgan said. 

STF willing to talk, wants to be heard 

The executive director of the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation, Gwen Dueck, agrees there are inequities between local agreements across the province.

She says all of the changes to education in the past decade or so — from the size of school divisions, to taxing authority — have contributed to greater disparity between those agreements. 

While Dueck says the STF is open to change, it is important that some mechanism remain for dealing with the local needs of teachers in their own division.