A smaller-than-anticipated deficit for the Chinook School Division over the 2017-18 year was reported yesterday.

The annual report still has to be approved by the ministry of education and tabled in legislature, which doesn't usually happen until the end of December. Then it will become public.

But speaking generally about the report auditor Stark & Marsh CPA LLP gave to the school division, their Chief Financial Officer Rod Quintin said their deficit for the period running from September 1, 2017 to August 31, 2018 was $4 million - less than the expected $5.95 million.

"Some challenges related to facilities are energy related, really it was kind of a cold winter and higher-than-anticipated costs," Quintin said. "But for the most part everything else went better than planned. We watched our expenditures very closely last year so that we could make that we weren't over budget."

Transportation and substitute teacher costs were also reduced.

Quintin said making a move to smaller buses, that use less fuel, helped bring down the price of transportation.

It also dropped because of less professional development days being held - though Quintin doesn't think that's a long-term solution.

"We have been saying at length to the ministry that we can't sustain this for long. We know that we have to continue to build that capacity... We know that we need to start to reinvest in professional development as we move forward. This was more or less our year to really try and cut our costs. But we have not eliminated those particular costs. We've just deferred them."

Cutting down on professional development meant not only lower transportation costs, but also less money needing to be spend on substitutes for when the full-time teachers were gone.

Quintin added that costs for substitutes on a whole were lower than usual.

"We always build in a little contingency for staff - teaching staff in particular. Really it's one of those ones where you never know with 400+ teachers what your experience may be around long-term sick leaves. And we didn't have the long-term sick leaves that we reasonably should have; over time it does cycle, so we're in a bit of a low point in the cycle in terms of those types of leaves. That would have been a big, big difference there. We saved a significant amount of money related to substitute teacher days, and that was a concerted effort on our part where we would change the way we handled the deployment of sub teachers in schools for teachers that may be away."

Some of the deficit is covered in unrestricted reserves, and some is the amount in place for amortization (which Quintin explained isn't really cash, but rather an amount of dollars shown as the value of properties they have).