The approved 2023-24 budget aligns with the guiding principles and priorities identified for the upcoming school year. The 2023-24 budget report and highlights are available here.
To further enhance our ability to meet the diverse learning needs of students, the 2023-24 budget:
- focuses on lean and efficient operations allowing us to use a significant amount of our board and system administration funding for instruction. For 2023-24, we are underspending our board and system administration allocation by $236,830 and using these resources to support instructional expenses.
- invests in people by adding additional teachers and instructional support staff, as well as increasing the FTE of some existing staff. At FFCA, 87% of our instruction expenses are staff salaries and benefits. For 2023-24, we have approved the addition of up to 7.0 FTEs of certificated teachers to focus on providing inclusion support in the K-8 campuses and eliminate the need for many high school teachers to teach without any allocated prep time during half of the year. We have also approved the addition of 8.0 FTEs of general or specialized learning assistants and external contractors to help meet students' varied learning needs.
- invests in people by increasing certificated and non-certificated salary grids by 2%. Although FFCA has not always aligned increases amongst certificated and support staff, the 2023-24 budget allocates an additional $100,000 to increase support staff salaries by the same 2% that the Government of Alberta provided for certificated teachers across the province.
- invests in providing additional professional learning and opportunities for collaborative capacity-building by allocating an additional $80,000 to support inclusion-focused professional development and release-time for collaborative learning across the system.
The Board of Directors is pleased that the 2023-24 budget provides us with an opportunity to better meet student needs in an inclusive environment. We are also pleased that it enables us to show our appreciation for our employees’ contributions to the tradition of educational excellence that FFCA has established. Thank you!