Alberta change to student funding formula aims to ease classroom pressures
CBC
School enrolment and rising costs are putting pressure on Alberta schools, but economic uncertainty — including the on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs — prevented the province from spending more on classrooms, says the education minister.
"[The Alberta budget was] done with the backdrop of tariffs, which, at that time ... was a threat, but now, a reality," Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said in an interview last week.
The proposed 2025-26 budget would be the first year that planned spending for pre-kindergarten through Grade 12 education will exceed $10 billion.
A key change involves the enrolment-based funding formula.
In 2020, the United Conservative Party introduced a weighted moving average (WMA), which based funding on enrolment counts over a three-year rolling average.
It was intended to give a financial cushion to rural school divisions that were seeing drops in enrolment. But the formula became problematic when enrolment growth accelerated in urban and suburban school divisions, leaving them effectively education the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of students without funding.
The most recent budget, released on Feb. 27, replaced the WMA with a two-year average adjusted enrolment method. Under the new calculation, 70 per cent of funding is based on anticipated enrolment, with the remainder based on current student numbers, Nicolaides said.
"Moving to a two-year [calculation] is our attempt to hopefully strike the right balance to be able to get dollars to fast-growing school divisions in a much faster way, and also provide as much long-term stability as we possibly can to smaller school divisions," he said.
At Edmonton Public Schools, Alberta's second-largest school division, the change will reduce the number of unfunded students to the equivalent of 1,000, down from about 3,000, said board chair Julie Kusiek.
"Does it fully address our desire to have every single student funded? No, but that will continue to be a conversation that we have with government," Kusiek said.
A report received by board trustees last week said the student population is expected to grow by 4.1 per cent this year, with 125,173 students likely to be enrolled by Sept. 30.
The provincial budget promises a 4.5 per cent increase in operating funds. However, it also noted that costs are expected to rise by about 7.3 per cent.
"The chronic underfunding of public education in Alberta has created a crisis that can no longer be ignored, especially for students with special needs," said Alberta Teachers' Association president Jason Schilling.
Classroom conditions are deteriorating, he said. Some teachers can't get enough support to manage students with complex needs; others have 40 or more students and can't keep up with marking.
School enrolment and rising costs are putting pressure on Alberta schools, but economic uncertainty — including the on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs — prevented the province from spending more on classrooms, says the education minister.
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