Following Friday’s announcement that staffing cuts had been made, Chinook School Division met yesterday to speak on some of their incoming changes.

After March’s Provincial budget was released, it was announced that Chinook would receive the largest budget cut out of all 28 Provincial school boards. Kyle McIntyre, Acting Director for Chinook School Division, says the school division had to make some big cuts.

“We’ve had a very challenging time financially as a school division, and certainly we have to make some difficult decisions here, and so we’ve been in the process with the board for a number of months, reviewing all our programs, personal, supports we offer,” he said.

“We’re looking for ways to meet the challenges we have both with the provincial deficit, and also the reallocation of educational resources to school divisions in the province,” he said. “So really, we’ve been hit with a double-whammy that we have to respond to as an organization.”

In total, the Division has $8.8 million less than the year before. In addition to the cut from the Provincial budget, totalling $5.94 million, they also received a reallocation of their supports for learning, a 27% decrease. So far, nine staff have been cut, and another 25 reassigned from the central office.

“We’re trying to go everywhere we can without impacting the classroom,” he said. “The coaches we took out of central office, those are people who travelled to other schools, worked one-on-one with teachers and other groups of kids.

“They’re going to benefit the schools they go to, but when you’re a coach in that central office, you can impact a whole a lot of teachers and a whole lot of kids. So we won’t have that same level of in-depth training and support we had previously for our teachers.”

As the division finds way to deal with the cuts they have received, McIntyre says they will continue to evolve the division as a whole.

“We are going to have to reevaluate our present models, and look to do things differently,” he said. “Are we still going to meet the needs of kids? Absolutely we’re going to. Are we going to have to look at different delivery models? Absolutely we have to. Right now we’re just trying to recoil from our budget news and this educational finance.”