Following the Alberta Budget announcement on Feb. 27, Rocky View Schools Division (RVS) celebrated the positive despite some accompanying challenges.
The positive being that this year, the Alberta government seemed to have adjusted the funding formula for school divisions, which still utilizes the previous year’s enrolment numbers. The new methodology used is not based on a three-years Weighted Moving Average (WMA), rather an Average Adjusted Enrolment (AAE).
At present it may be too soon to speculate whether the AAE is going to be the new WMA; however, Superintendent of Schools, Greg Luterbach, personally found this change interesting.
“The government had committed to looking at [the WMA] over the winter break; we heard that directly from Ministers…” Luterbach said, adding that, “They have changed it from a three years weighted average to now, an average-adjusted enrolment methodology.”
While he stated his uncertainty over everything the AAE would entail, Luterbach explained it will likely be a great improvement on the current funding formula even if it ultimately still falls short of the "“every student is being funded” principle, which has been a primary priority RVS Board has been advocating for over the past number of years.
“That’s good news for growing school divisions across the province,” Luterbach expressed. “So good news: movement in the right direction, just not as far as I think is what we’ve been asking the government to make.”
This year, the provincial education budget will also increase by 4.5 per cent, that means a $9.9 billion budget to address increased enrolment pressures, staffing shortages and more.
That directly indicates schools should be able to hire more than 4,000 education staff, including teachers, administrative assistance, education assistance, bus drivers, and other support staff.
“But that is the responsibility of 61 school divisions to actually decide how they’re going to spend that money,” Luterbach said. “It isn’t unique to this government; I’ve seen it over and over [as] they try to be able to connect what the funding increase might mean.”
However, not everything about the budget is a positive, said Luterbach.
The elimination of the Supplemental Enrolment Grant from this year’s Education Budget is a significant challenge for RVS, Luterbach explained. This grant provided an additional funding to divisions with increasing enrolment.
The pressing issue of ‘Student growth not properly funded in RVS’ has already been addressed in a previous reports. At the end of Sept. 2024 enrolment in RVS was 29,243, likely rising to 29,481 by the end of Jan. 2025. That’s a difference of an additional 245 students which are not currently being funded by the province.
Additionally, there’s a 4.5 per cent hike in Education Property Tax (EPT), which was frozen in the 2024-25 budget year. On behalf of the provincial government, municipalities collect EPT, which is levied alongside municipal property taxes, based on the value of the property.
“What was interesting to me is that even with all those dollars collected around the province next year, even after this increase, it is only going to cover 31.6 per cent of the K to 12 education budget,” Luterbach stated.
It is worth noting that general revenues of taxes collected across the province will pay two thirds of that amount.
As far as the opinions of the various municipalities are concerned, they aren’t excited about having to collect increased EPT from residents, who generally get upset when they see their taxes have gone up even if the municipality is not to blame in this instance. Mid-sized Cities Mayors' Caucus chair and Mayor of Cochrane, Jeff Genung, recently explained it was likely a necessary trade-off to fund new school builds.
"So landowners will be taxed more for the education property tax portion, which I think is a good thing as far as the Province understands the need for more schools, now they’ve got to fund it," he said.
Come mid-March, RVS will receive a document from the provincial government that has a detailed breakdown of an amount that the division will receive based on the enrolment projections for the basic grasp.
Luterbach said he hoped a breakdown of exact dollar amounts for various education categories would be received by RVS before their Budget Committee meeting on Mar. 13.
