They’re not leaving it yet, but St. Albert’s public school trustees say they want some big changes to this city’s school allocation agreement.
But trustees and the city’s mayor agree that St. Albert’s school site woes won’t be solved without some major reforms to the Municipal Government Act.
After extensive debate, the St. Albert Public School board voted 3-1 against a motion from Trustee Sheri Wright Wednesday to have the board withdraw from the city’s school site allocation agreement by the end of August. Wright was absent from the meeting.
Instead, the board voted unanimously to call on the agreement’s signatories to revise the agreement’s rules regarding strategic site allocation and site pre-allocation.
The school site agreement outlines how the superintendents of the Greater St. Albert Catholic, St. Albert Public, and Greater North Central Francophone school boards work with St. Albert’s city manager to decide which board gets which school site.
St. Albert council passed a motion Monday that called for the creation of an amendment to this deal that would make council, not the superintendents, the final authority when it comes to that decision.
Public board chair Glenys Edwards noted that even if the city passed such an amendment, it wouldn’t take effect unless the three school boards also agreed to implement it.
And the public board does not support that amendment, she said. Site allocation involves demographic factors such as enrolment trends and grade configurations, and these were administrative, not political, issues.
“We would like the site allocation process to be administrative and not political.”
Still, the allocation agreement does need to be changed as outlined in the board’s motion, she continued.
The motion deals with two parts of the agreement.
The strategic allocation portion of the agreement refers to a principle that sites are allocated in a way that respects the need for a “balance of school jurisdiction presence” within the city.
The current agreement was signed back when the city’s students were split 50/50 between the Protestant and Catholic boards, Edwards said. This principle meant that both boards would always get an equal number of school sites. Since the public (formerly Protestant) board now has about 65 per cent of the students, the public board wants to re-examine this principle in case it becomes an issue in the future.
Pre-allocation portion of the agreement refers to the agreement’s ban on sites being allocated to a board before the province approves funding for a school.
That ban became a problem with the Jensen Lakes site, Edwards said – the province had announced cash for a new public school, but the city hadn’t allocated the site to the public board. The allocation happened at the last minute, putting the funding at risk.
Pre-allocation would let boards know ahead of time who got which site so that they could tell Alberta Education that yes, they do have a site available for the school they wanted to build, she explained.
Looming above these issues is the Municipal Government Act (MGA) and how it affects the creation of school sites.
The lack of school sites in the right place and of the right size has prompted a lot of the recent discussions around site allocation, Edwards said. This is an MGA issue that the board had to work out with the province.
Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools board chair Noreen Radford agreed, adding that this was a province-wide issue.
“Schools are announced, but there isn’t necessarily land available.”
The MGA is a significant part of this dispute, said Mayor Nolan. Developers don’t want to give more than 10 per cent of their land as municipal reserve, and that reserve has to be split between schools, parks, libraries and other amenities. With land so expensive, the province, school boards and municipalities don’t want to buy more. The end result is not enough land for schools.
“What can we do? Advocate to the province to change the law.”
The public board will now have its administrators work out reforms to the school site agreement, Edwards said.
