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Hi, my name is Natasha Hicks and I’m the assistant director here at THEE. Today I just want to talk to you a little bit about the timeline for reimbursements with funding. The big question we get is, “Why is it taking so long to get my funding?” There are a few reasons for the delays in the fall. I just want to kind of break down the process that it takes for us so you can kind of understand why you just don’t get it immediately. I know a lot of people do think sometimes that, you know, September 1st the funding is there and I can submit my receipts and get my reimbursement. Unfortunately, that’s not quite how it works.
Alberta Education doesn’t actually give out funding until the end of September. Now that the 30th is a stat holiday, the 29th is the count date for Alberta Education. They wait until after that and then they actually give us until a few days into that first week of October before they start calculating our amounts for us. So definitely not in September do we do anything with reimbursements because we don’t have any funding yet. Once we get all of the funding, or once we’ve finalized all of our registrations, then we can know what we’re going to have for funding. But then what we have to do is create our parent funding accounts.
All of these accounts are by family, so it’s not by student. We have to take and make sure that all of the families are correct, right? So we have to make sure that each parent has the correct children in their account and the amount of funding for those students, which this year we do have funding for the grades 1 through 12, as well as kindergarten. But kindergarten is only funded at 50%. Those amounts we do have to make sure that the amount is correct that goes into the family funding account before we can start looking at reimbursements. And that’s for both you and us. You want to make sure you get your full amount of funding and the correct amount of funding, and we need to also make sure that each family gets the correct amount of funding and nobody’s getting somebody else’s funding accidentally or not enough funding accidentally. As you can imagine with, you know, 2,000 students, we have a lot of families that even have similar names and all of that, so it does take a bit of time for us to create all of those accounts and get the funding where it belongs. So that’s why we aren’t able to start doing reimbursements until October. Once we get all of the registrations done, then we can create those family funding accounts, and then we’re able to put the reimbursements through. So it does take a little bit of time.
I guess one of the other things on the accounting side of things are those direct deposit forms. We encourage our families to submit direct deposit forms just to make it easier to get your funding. Unfortunately, checks do still go missing when we mail out hard copy checks, so it is best to do it by direct deposit. But then that also is a step in our process for getting everything entered. So we usually start processing the reimbursements by the middle of October, but it still might not start going out until closer to the end of October, and then obviously you’ll start seeing it, you know, for sure in November you’re seeing it. But we also do try to keep everything in order that we receive it. So if you send in your reimbursement request say on September 15th, but somebody else sent theirs in on September 1st or say August 25th, obviously those ones do come first. So just because you send it or you say you send it in on October 15th, you might think, “Well, that should be the first one to go out,” or “we should be seeing it right away because we can do it.” And that’s true, but usually we’re catching up on a couple hundred people who have already submitted them just because the volume is quite large in the fall.
We do ask that you be a little bit patient with us because we do have quite a few steps right at the beginning of the year that have to be done every year just to get everything everything going so that we can do up those reimbursements for you. But we are on it, and we are trying our best to get them done as quickly as possible. I promise you, and we we understand that you are anxiously awaiting that reimbursement. So we just ask that you’re patient with us because we are we are doing our best. But that is the the rundown of things. Again, if you have any questions, you can give us a call at the office or email our finance email address, and we will be happy to help you out. Thank you and have a great day.
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