Horizon School Division faced a more than $1 million deficit due to provincial underfunding as officials started work on the 2018-19 budget, director of Kevin Garinger said.

The division received a 0.6 per cent increase in operational funding from the education ministry - not enough to cover even the $600,000 in salary increases as staff worked their way up the grid.

“We’re already almost $200,000 behind just in dealing with grid creep that relates directly to teachers. Not in relation to any other sort of increases or costs that are associated with other employee groups,” director of education Kevin Garinger said.

Though the Sask Party government restored $30 million for K-12 education this year after cutting $54 million last year, that cash isn’t split equally among school divisions, Garinger said.

Instead, it’s based on enrollment projections - and since Horizon’s numbers are static, it received the 0.6 per cent increase, which works out to $443,000.

“When we look at our overall increase, it still meant then that we had a significant deficit that we’d have to try and address.”

Education assistants, librarians, secretaries, occupational therapists, student counsellors, and outreach workers all lost between four and 13 working days, and Horizon cut the only two speech pathologist assistant positions, CUPE said in a news release.

“The cut in days will mean less time for education assistants to prepare for students and work with teachers on individualized learning plans for unique student needs. Outreach workers, counsellors, and occupational therapists will have less time to gather resources to put programs and services in place for students before the school year starts,” Marie Moore, President of CUPE Local 4799, said in the release.

Garinger said those decisions are never made lightly and the division cut working days to avoid cutting jobs entirely.

CUPE employees received a 2.1 per cent raise this year as a result of their collective agreement, so the result is they’ll earn about the same as they did in 2017-18, he said.

Administration costs have been cut four per cent, on top of cuts made last year.

“At some point you reach that point where you can’t take any more hits to your office and that sort of thing, but as hard as this is and as more challenging as it is for us - it just means we’re putting more on the plates of people - we have to do it,” Garinger said.

Those types of non-instructional cuts are the price of the division’s commitment to a low student-teacher ratio, which Garinger says is one of the lowest in Saskatchewan.

“We want that contact time between teacher and student. And when we have smaller class sizes we’re able to have that type of contact time more impactful.”

Smaller class sizes also help the division work to maintain a maximum of two grades in a classroom, he said.

He said he recognizes the provincial government has a limited amount of money available but will advocate for the needs of students and staff.