Data won't tell us how crowded Alberta's schools are anymore — so we went asking

Students in Alberta schools are back to classes this week, not that far removed from a challenging period of time upended by the COVID-19 pandemic and defined by virtual learning.

They'll enter a school year in which you'll likely be hearing a lot about schools being overcrowded with students. There are a lot of reasons for that — with various remedies proposed — which we'll get into later.

What isn't clear at this stage is exactly how overcrowded Alberta's schools are. 

In 2019, the provincial government ended a practice of publicly reporting how many students were in each class at each public, charter and separate school in the province. 

It followed then-Alberta education minister Adriana LaGrange suggesting that funding to reduce class sizes had failed. 

"What we're hearing from school boards is that, as a whole, this has not met its objective and that we have continued to throw ever increasing dollars — $291 million alone [in 2018/19] — and we have not moved the needle at all in terms of addressing the class size issue," LaGrange said in 2019.

Guidelines for class sizes — for example, fewer than 25 students in Grades 7 to 9 — had been suggested in 2003 by Alberta's Commission on Learning, though the recommendations were not always followed over the years. Still, over that period of time, provincial governments spent billions trying to shrink class sizes. 

As part of the 2017/18 school year, nearly 68 per cent of CBE classes across all grades exceeded target levels, up 47 per cent from a decade earlier.

Albertans don't have the same luxury today of knowing precisely how crowded classrooms are, but there are various pieces of the puzzle parents can piece together to get a sense of what's going on.

A survey conducted by the Alberta Teachers' Association (ATA) in late 2022 suggested that four in 10 Alberta teachers have class sizes over 30 students, with the growth in class sizes most prominent in elementary grades, high school science and math, and junior high school math, as well as English language arts.

All week, The Calgary Eyeopener is highlighting the impacts of rising enrolment on schools in the province. As a part of that series, CBC News went asking all involved about what they've been seeing.

Calgary parent Misty Russell has two kids, aged six and eight, who attend school in the southeast. For her, the biggest concern she has about class sizes involves the limited amount of attention a teacher is able to provide.

"When there's so many [more] kids-to-teacher ratio, the kids don't necessarily get the things that they need, right?" she said.

Amanda Mauch's daughter is further along in her schooling in Grade 10. Mauch said the opening of the long-awaited North Trail High School in northeast Calgary in late August was huge for her family.