The provincial government announced Thursday morning they would be providing additional money for school divisions in Saskatchewan to help cover the increased costs of fuel and insurance.  

In a release, the province stated that the $20 million, to be spread across 27 divisions, is so that school divisions will be able to prevent inflationary costs from diverting resources away from classrooms.  

"Our government recognizes the impacts rising costs across the country have on our schools and we are committed to ensuring every Saskatchewan student and teacher has the supports needed to achieve success in the classroom," Education Minister Dustin Duncan said. "Now that school board budgets have been submitted, we have weighed the impact of fuel and insurance costs on their operations and are in a position to provide further assistance to divisions." 

Here in the southeast part of the province, the South East Cornerstone Public School Division will be receiving $1.3 million from the province. This comes after the division announced they had a $6.29 million shortfall in the budget after announcing there would be 35 full-time equivalent positions eliminated for the next school year. 

The Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division will be receiving just over $83,000. In their budget for the 2022-23 school year, they announced they had taken over $800,000 from reserves to balance the budget. 

In the provincial budget for the 2022-23 fiscal year, there was $1.99 billion in operational funding announced for the school divisions of the province, an increase of 1.5 percent over the previous school year. During the same time frame, the consumer price index, or the rate of inflation, increased by 5.9 percent.