Red River Valley SD raises special levy 11.3%

Some property owners living in Red River School Division (RRVSD) will be paying more school tax due according to the $41.23-million proposed budget presented at Rosenort School March 10.

It is some and not all because the Province changed its school tax rebate formula to a flat $1,500 for home owners, instead of a percentage. That means the lower the property value, the less you pay. Residential properties valued at under $294,000 in RRVSD will not be paying any school tax, with the mill rate at 11.316 charged on 45 percent of the value.

But with the property value assessment in division communities increasing 18.118 percent, more properties will pass that threshold. Farms continue to get a 50 percent rebate.

The budget is up $2.42 million, or 6.2 percent from last year. RRVSD got a lower provincial funding increase than most: 1.2 percent. Money from the province makes up 35.3 percent of the division’s revenue, and $160,000 of it must be spent on the new province-wide nutrition program.

More spending covers the 3.5 percent increase in teacher salaries, and a five percent boost to support staff salaries.

“That increase for our support staff, they’re our lowest paid employees, they’ve been hit probably the hardest by inflation, and this is going to basically catch them up to the teachers’ settlement,” said Superintendent Brad Curtis.

There will also be 5.5 more hours dedicated to speech and language educational assistant (EA) support. With not enough speech language therapists to go around, EAs will be helping in that role.

In the budget is a full-time spare bus driver to cover any driver who calls in sick and field trips, more money for bus drivers when they do not have kids on the bus, more teacher professional development, and more money for administration to meet in person instead of online.

Starbuck and Oak Bluff get money for music instruments to potentially start a band program in the fall.

Curtis called the budget the best one in his eight years that he has seen. He pointed to fewer general funds and more specifics in the plan. It is also the last one for him as he retires this summer.

“We hit a lot of areas for every staff group across the whole division. There’s something in there for everyone,” said Curtis during the presentation.

Board Chair Heather Poirier said it’s the best budget they could make with what they got from the province.

“I think like all Manitoba school divisions, we’re still waiting to see if a new funding model is actually coming. But there’s caution in that, it might not be favourable to us,” said Poirier.

“But I feel like the decisions that we’ve made over the past few years have kind of landed us in a spot now where we’re able to kind of hit all those pieces.”

RRVSD was one of the only school divisions in the province to break the no new school tax policy in place when the PCs were in power in 2023. The school board and administration agreed to risk the consequences to raise taxes 8.5 percent then. The new NDP government did not enforce the provincial grant penalty in 2024, when RRVSD raised taxes 3.1 percent in its $38.81-million budget.

Poirier said the community survey open to staff, parents and whomever wanted to fill it helped shape the budget.

“Nobody’s ever said hey, I’d like us to do less. People always want more,” said Poirier.

“Everybody wants more for their kids, that’s very normal… but I think when you look at things over the past few years, there’s been a lot of challenge to that. I think having the teachers’ contract settled while it cost us money, it’s nice to know that’s done and we know what the expectation is: we know what the next raise is going to be so you can kind of plan ahead a little bit.”

There are 41 bus routes in RRVSD carrying 1,375 of the nearly 2,400 students.

It has nine public schools and four Hutterite schools on both sides of the Red River in 12 municipalities from the RMs of MacDonald, Morris and Montcalm in the west, to Ritchot (Ste Agathe), De Salaberry and St Pierre in the west.