The school taxes collected on property where students attending Limerick School live are more than enough to pay to operate the facility.
And that’s reason enough to keep it open, say residents and taxpayers.
Limerick, Sask., has 47 students in Kindergarten through Grade 12 and is one of the five rural schools under review by the Prairie South School Division. The others are Briercrest, Chaplin, Crane Valley and Willow Bunch.
The last of meetings with the division board in the affected communities was held in Limerick last week. School community council chair Michael Cobbe said there weren’t a lot of fireworks; most people had vented at a previous meeting.
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“We did get something that we’ve been looking for for quite a while,” he said in a Feb. 22 interview.
That was financial data about the costs covered by the locally collected school tax on property. School boards and divisions typically say the money goes into one pot and is used by both rural and urban schools.
Some suggest that urban schools subsidize the rural, but farmland owners have always said they pay more than their share. Numbers provided at the Limerick meeting suggest taxes collected locally at least cover costs.
“The Limerick district school tax levy on property would pay 103 percent of the operating costs of our school,” Cobbe said.
If the school was operating outside of the division, it would be able to pay its own way without receiving a penny of provincial funding.
“Students generate about $360,000 in provincial grants which go into the school district coffers,” Cobbe added.
He has calculated that the division would save about $221,000 if it closed the school, or 0.3 percent of its total expenses.
Cobbe also calculated that if those savings were applied to the division’s operating deficit of $5.7 million, the division would have to shut down 19 more Limerick-sized schools this year and 25 every year after.
“They’re going to be running out of rural schools to close,” he said.
The division includes 45 schools. Of those, 25 are rural, five are Hutterite colony schools and two are associates – Cornerstone Christian in Moose Jaw and Caronport High School.
The problems facing Prairie South are not unique. Several divisions across the province are reviewing the future of about 50 schools.
Declining enrolment is a big reason, as the number of children continues to drop. For example, in 1995-96, the schools that are now in Prairie South had nearly 10,000 students. Last fall, there were 7,200.
The division has projected that Crane Valley, which has 38 students, and Briercrest, at 26, will continue to lose students, while Chaplin, with 50 students, Willow Bunch, also 50, and Limerick, should hold steady or show a small increase.
“While student numbers are dropping, there has not been an equivalent drop in the number of teachers in the division,” the board said in a document for electors. “Nor has there been a corresponding reduction of school space.”
In fact, all the schools in Prairie South could accommodate twice as many students.
Provincial government funding for schools is allocated on a per-student basis. The board said the average cost per student per school is $6,750 across the division and $7,340 in schools outside the city of Moose Jaw.
The board has set up three meetings later in March to hear from delegations about the schools under review. It will make a decision in May.
