St. Albert and Sturgeon County schools will be short nearly $900,000 dollars this fall due to funding cuts from the province.
The provincial government released its projected school operational funding reports for the 2024/2025 school year on May 6. The reports show how much operating money Alberta’s 77 school boards receive each year.
Fifteen boards, including Greater St. Albert Catholic and Sturgeon Public, will receive less money this fall than they did this last school year, the reports show. The rest, including St. Albert Public and Greater North Central Francophone, will get more, with the Calgary School Division seeing the biggest increase at about $85.2 million. The Boyle Street Education Centre’s funding is unchanged.
Most of these funding drops are linked to the province’s 2020 decision to change how it calculated school funding, said Alberta Teachers’ Association president Jason Schilling. Instead of basing it on current enrolment, the province now doles out cash based on a weighted rolling average of a board’s current, previous year, and projected next year enrolment. If a board sees a spike in enrolment, those new students aren’t immediately funded, as it takes years before the spike is fully reflected in the three-year average.
Sturgeon Public and Greater St. Albert Catholic were amongst a handful of boards to get stabilization funding to cover losses due to this shift. Nine of the 15 boards getting less money this fall are receiving this funding.
Students underfunded
GSACRD will be underfunded by about $360,000 this fall due to in most part to a drop in stabilization funding, which is being phased out over four years, said board chair Lydia Yeomans. While the board was working hard to keep this from affecting the classroom, Yeoman questioned why these cuts were happening when other, smaller boards were getting millions more.
“We just find that really inequitable.”
Sturgeon Public will get $500,310 less this fall due in most part to a roughly $1.4 million drop in stabilization funding, the reports show. Board officials were not available for comment by press time.
Greater North Central Francophone and St. Albert Public officials declined to comment on these funding changes.
Schilling said the weighted moving average means it takes several years for a board’s funding to catch up with its population growth. He called on the province to re-examine the weighted moving average and to find the political will to invest in education.
“We’re the least funded jurisdiction in all of Canada, and to meet just the average we’d need a 13 per cent increase to [education] funding, not 4.4,” he said, referring to the 4.4 per cent overall increase in education funding in the most recent provincial budget.
In a media release, Schilling said per-pupil education spending in Alberta was now down 13 per cent province-wide relative to 2019 when adjusted for inflation, resulting in bigger classes, cut programs, and fewer supports for students. He called on the province to immediately announce new funding for education for this fall.
In an emailed statement, Alberta Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said some school boards would see “very small reductions” in funding this fall due mostly to falling enrolment and lower COVID-related funding.
“Funding to education in Alberta is at record high levels, which will result in thousands of new teachers, dozens of new schools and support for complex classrooms to ensure no student is left behind.”
The projected operational funding for the 2024/2025 school year reports can be found at bit.ly/3yD2PB3.
