It’s not all bad news for the Bluewater public school board.
The board finished the last fiscal year with a 1.9 million dollar budget surplus, enough to erase their deficit.
Back in May of this year, trustees were trying to find four million dollars in savings to balance the books.
Director of Education Mary Anne Alton says seeing the light at the end of the tunnel has been a long time coming and staff have been focusing on getting rid of the situation since 2002.
Provincial law prohibits school boards from running deficits.
Alton says a lot of sacrifices were made, staff development has been reduced and budgets with any amount of discretion no longer exist.
She says money has recently arrived from the Ministry of Education for some initiatives that has given the board additional revenue.
Auditors recently finished examining the board’s books and discovered over 2.3 million is in reserves for 2009 and over 6.3 million set aside for capital projects.