THE CLASS-SIZE CONUNDRUM

Alberta educators are teaching larger, more complex groups of students, leading some to sound the alarm about a teacher burnout epidemic

A Grade 5 teacher has 36 students in his class. Fourteen of them need extra help.

An Edmonton mom said 31 children are crammed into her son’s too-small kindergarten classroom. An Edmonton high school English teacher says all five of her classes have 30 or more students, and 50 of the students are learning English. It adds up to 165 papers to mark.

The Alberta Teachers’ Association is prompting teachers and parents to share scenarios like these on social media, and with their MLAs, after hearing about unmanageably large class sizes from teachers across the province.

“Excellent teachers are starting to burn out because of the workload of so many kids in front of them every day. We’re concerned that especially our young teachers may walk away from the profession, just from pure frustration,” association president Greg Jeffery said Thursday.

Alberta needs between 2,000 and 3,000 more teachers for publicly funded classrooms to meet the guidelines established in 2003 by the Alberta Commission on Learning, Jeffery said.

Those guidelines state the average size of kindergarten-to-Grade 3 classes should be 17 students, Grade 4 to Grade 6 classes should be 23 students, junior high classes should be 25 students, and high school classes should be 27 students. The teachers’ association said only five of the province’s 61 school districts are meeting the K-3 guidelines, and those districts are educating just two per cent of the province’s students.

Last school year, Edmonton public and Sherwood Park-based Elk Island Public Schools had the highest average K-3 class sizes in the province at 22.2 children, according to numbers Alberta Education posted online.

With an average of 29.1 teens per class, Calgary Board of Education’s high school classes were the largest, followed closely by Edmonton public and Calgary Catholic schools. After the commission issued the guidelines, the government invested more in teachers, and Alberta schools came close to meeting the guidelines for students in Grades 4 to 12, Jeffery said.

That trend reversed when the economy faltered in 2008 and, with enrolment steadily climbing since then, class sizes have moved further and further from those goals, he said.

Classrooms have also become more complicated as the numbers of students with challenges, disabilities or who need help learning English grow, Jeffery said.

We’re concerned that especially our young teachers may walk away from the profession, just from pure frustration.