Teachers, trustees warn of ‘profound’ impacts
After Thursday’s provincial budget eliminated three crucial K-12 education grants, fast-growing urban schools and the province’s youngest students may be the hardest hit, as educators and schools still calculate the fallout.
The classroom improvement fund, the class size initiative and the Bill 1 transportation and school fee reduction grant were all eliminated and their collective $428 million was reallocated towards instruction costs.
A new one-time transitional grant of $150 million was created to help deal with growing student enrolment across the province.
“That will have a very real impact on our families and our students,” said Trisha Estabrooks, chair of the board at Edmonton Public Schools, in an interview.
It has created a substantial funding gap in Edmonton public’s budget, the fastest-growing district in the province, where enrolment is going up three per cent, or by 3,000 students per year, said Estabrooks.
“This is not an insignificant gap, and our district will have to use surplus funds to help offset these changes. Our surplus dollars will only go so far. This is not a longterm solution and will place our district in a critical position in the near future,” said Estabrooks in an emailed statement.
Meanwhile, the province’s student transportation budget went from $375 million in actual spending last year, to $362 million estimated for this year — and will stay flat until at least 2022-23.
“We’re in a tight situation here, and transportation is one of a couple of different areas where we’re seeing the elimination of funds. Any cut to transportation does mean, unfortunately, that we’ll have to pass that along to families,” said Estabrooks.
The provincial budget maintained current education funding levels at $8.2 billion per year, but there are no planned increases for the rest of the four-year mandate. For urban school boards, that means the government has replaced a $1,522 class size grant with a $203 per pupil one-time transition grant, according to the Alberta Teachers’ Association.
The ministry is consulting with stakeholders as part of an assurance and funding review, according to the budget. This will support the development of a new K-12 assurance and funding framework that will come into effect in September 2020 for the 2020-21 school year.
The government’s fiscal plan promises that the framework will contain cost growth, predictably allocate funds, and increase the share of funding going into classrooms — but does not outline how.
Total instruction funding for first- to third-grade students was reduced from $8,201 per student in 2018-19, to $6,883 per student in 2019-20, according to the teachers’ association. The situation for rural school boards is only slightly better, where the transition funding is $356 per student.
“We were shocked to discover that, on further analysis, this budget is even worse than initially anticipated for K-12 education. The impact will be profound,” said Jason Schilling, the association’s president, in a statement.