As Alberta prepares to unveil its new budget at the end of February, all eyes are on the education sector.
There's particular concern over how funding will address the growing issues of overcrowded schools, surging class sizes, and a lack of resources for teachers to meet the complex needs of students; especially in smaller towns and cities.
Board of Trustees chair for Rocky View Schools (RVS) Fiona Gilbert sheds light on a few major challenges that various school boards continue to face.
The first one being population growth, with which comes various impacts.
“A year or two back, the provincial government invited the world to come to Alberta and they have been [coming] in great numbers; now the public education system needs to catch up and keep pace with all these new students in our schools,” Gilbert said.
That leads to the second issue—the shortage of teachers along with more staff in schools.
“The shortage of teachers is a real concern for [RVS],” Gilbert emphasized.
She pointed out that teachers are leaving the profession earlier than they used to and fewer people are entering the teaching profession. It’s the ripple effect and not a sustainable trend according to Gilbert.
Given the limited funding and resources available, the compensation of the non-teaching staff at public schools is less than that available in private schools.
The third challenge seems to be the desperate need of bigger-sized classrooms and more schools to aid high utilizations leading to overcapacity.
Earlier in January 2025, Premiere Danielle Smith said one of her government’s key commitments this year would be to address education infrastructure issues.
In particular, she emphasized that prioritizing new school construction will be a key strategy to address the concerns of parents across the province.
However, the Opposition NDP says, while building new schools is important, the biggest challenge for Alberta classrooms is the shortfall on student per capita funding.
“The UCP is making that choice to fund education at the lowest level in the country and the consequence of that decision is this overcrowding and unaddressed complexity in the classroom,” said NDP MLA Amanda Chapman, who serves as the Opposition's Shadow Minister of Education.
The weighted-moving-average (WMA) method is how the funding for the education system is calculated in the province, which has contributed to the arising issues in teaching and learning within Alberta, according to Chapman. The WMA funds student populations on a three-year curve instead of on annual basis.
Chapman is looking to see a change to that model to ensure that every child who’s in the classroom is being funded today.
“That would mean instead of three years, they look at one year at a time,” she said.
Chapman acknowledged that school boards had desired more predictability in their funding, which is why the Kenney government first introduced weighted-moving-average.
“The government may [have] fixed that one problem for them, but then at the same time, they created a much larger problem by not actually funding for the students, who were in a school every given year,” Chapman stated.
According to Chapman, it reflects the UCP government’s inability to plan.
“They haven’t shown themselves to be capable stewards of our education system,” Chapman said.
RVS Chair Gilbert agreed the WMA is a significant problem for her board and other across the province.
“They still have not covered what we need to spend in order to support students, teachers and staff, and that's because of this weighted-moving-average that we experience in the funding model for education,” she said.
Gilbert hoped government funding shortfalls for enrolment growth and increasing student needs in schools would be addressed as soon as possible.
“We’re experiencing the full impact of the three-year weighted impact of the three-year weighted-moving-average funding model, and not in a positive way,” she said.
And even with some recent commitments to increase student funding from the Smith government, Gilbert said it still felt like RVS and other school districts were largely just treading water.
"Even though there’s more dollars, spending the increases don’t actually translate to increasing in real spending because everything costs more,” she said.
In response to some of these concerns Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides shared that “in the next three years, we are providing $1.2 billion to hire more than 3,000 new teachers and other education support staff.”
He added that the UCP invested $1.5 billion the 2024 school year alone to support students' specialized learning needs.
According to Nicolaides, “more families are moving to Alberta so that’s why we made a record investment of $9.3 billion into education through Budget 2024 to accommodate this growth.”
However, Nicolaides was eager to put the spotlight back on his government's $8.6 billion funding commitment to building new schools.
“Further to this, we announced a generational commitment of $8.6 billion to build schools now,” he said in an emailed statement.
According to Nicolaides, this investment would contribute to building 90 new schools, modernize or replace another 24 of them and roll out more modular classrooms to create 200,000 new spaces for students within the next seven years.
However, Chapman says the NDP feels this investment should have been made a long time ago, explaining that $8.6 billion was to be distributed over three years.
“An average school takes three to five years to build; three years for an elementary school, five years for a more complex build such as a high school,” Chapman explained. Thus students who are currently in the education system will not see a benefit of this new school construction, she said.
“The earliest we will be seeing some of these schools come online is going to be in 2028.”
Those new school builds will be welcomed by RVS nonetheless, says Gilbert, and the district is hoping for even more when the provincial budget is released later this spring.
Gilbert appreciates that the government has acknowledged the spacing crisis in the RVS.
“We were awarded three new schools [last year], the design funding for two additional schools; so that is good news,” she said.
Part of that $8.6 billion investment includes a pilot project to fund private school construction for the first time in Alberta's history, which has drawn mixed responses from some Albertans.
In a Sept. 2024 news conference, Smith said, when asked about this unprecedented move, that she wants to put all of the different school options on the same level playing field.
