Sudbury Catholic District School Board is on track to eliminate its accumulated deficit one year earlier than originally planned after posting much better than expected results for the 2012-2013 financial year.
The school board's manager of financial services, Susan Anderson, told trustees at their Nov. 19 meeting that Sudbury Catholic ended the 2012-2013 financial year Aug. 31 with a $429,000 surplus.
A three-year recovery plan approved by the board earlier this year, which involved cutting the board's costs to match government funding, had projected a $1.5-million deficit for 2012-2013.
With these positive financial results, which were revealed after a recent audit by Collins, Barrow Chartered Accountants, the board is on target to eliminate its accumulated deficit by August 2015 rather than August 2016.
The deficit initially came about at the end of the 2011-2012 financial year, when Sudbury Catholic revealed it was $2.5 million in the hole, with that number expected to rise to $4 million by 2012-2013.
But the accumulated deficit as of Aug. 31 is actually about $2 million.
Part of the reason the board ended up in the hole were overly-optimistic enrolment projections, which led to inadequate provincial grants. This past year, though, actual enrolment was slightly higher than projected.
As well, 2012-2013 government grants were higher than expected, and there were several miscellaneous revenues, such as the sale of the Corpus Christi school property, which were not known when the recovery plan was approved.
“We had a three-year plan, and we've been able to whittle that down to a two-year plan,” said board chair Jody Cameron.
“We're much more financially sustainable going forward, and that's where we needed to be. We need to be able to match our expenditures to our revenues, and that's what we've done.”
