Monday night, the Chinook School Division held their 'Celebration of Learning' at the Living Sky Casino Event Centre.

Kyle McIntyre is the director of the Chinook School Division and talked about the goal of the event.

"The intention was to celebrate our learning plan and our learning success," he said. "We had a little dose of reality about our upcoming budget and some of the things we have to do to meet the challenges that the budget has presented to us."

McIntyre said that some of the challenges they face will be on how to deal with the budget that still threatens the division with cuts and a lack of funding, and how to manage the expectations of the province with diminishing resources.

"We cannot take diminishing resources and continue to stretch them among 62 schools," he said. "We recognize the importance of schools - the value of schools in communities, and the importance they have in a community. So we have to fund them so we can operate them adequately."

McIntyre said that the province expects the division to balance their budget by 2019-2020.

"There's an expectation from the ministry of learning and from the province that we balance our budget," he said. "We had to share a plan that we are going to implement over the next two years in an attempt to balance our budget. It's a bit of a balancing act. The challenge it that you're expected to balance a budget, but you still have to operate these schools to meet the learning needs of kids."

McIntyre said that to meet the challenge they are going to be implementing a new staffing formula over the next two years.

"We're looking through natural attrition: retirement, resignations, and managing vacancies. We're predicting about 28 teachers over the next two years that we are going to be down," he said. "Whatever we don't make up in the first year we are going to have to make up in our second year through layoffs."

McIntyre added that they would not be closing schools or cutting programming to help with their budget constraints.

It wasn't just budget talks and how the division will deal with it, as they did celebrate some of their accomplishments such as their focus on literacy where 84 percent of students are meeting or exceeding expectations. In Math where 79 per cent are meeting or exceeding expectations and their graduation rate is 84 per cent of students are on pace to graduate.

McIntyre said that turnout to the event wasn't what he expected.

"Certainly the turnout was a lot better than we've seen in previous annual meetings," he said. "Typically with an annual meeting you may have a handful of people typically most of which are staff members, and I think regarding the crowd we had tonight, the event was excellent."

McIntyre added that the reason for the turnout was due to the talks about the budget and how it will affect teachers and the students.

"I would say it concerns parents because they want what's best for their children. If something is going to happen to our division that's going to impact kids and impact school adversely, I think they need to be onside and know about it."

McIntyre added that looking ahead, to go all along with working on their budget they will also still be focusing on writing, graduation rates, and attendance within the division.