Alberta school boards facing unprecedented student growth will receive an additional $215 million in provincial support this summer, Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides announced Tuesday.
Nicolaides said $125 million will be dispersed to school districts to help with operational costs, while $90 million will go toward adding more modular classrooms in Calgary, Edmonton and Airdrie — three of the cities hit hardest by Alberta’s rapid enrolment growth.
The $215-million boost is on top of the $2.1 billion in capital funding over three years allocated to building new schools in the Alberta government’s 2024 budget.
“We’re seeing some incredible growth in our major metropolitan regions, in Calgary and Edmonton, so this targeted new funding will help alleviate some of that space pinch that our school boards are feeling, and also provide them with additional funding to help increase staffing levels and cover other costs,” Nicolaides told Postmedia ahead of Tuesday’s announcement.
“We just passed Budget 2024 (in the) spring and we’re already seeing projections with respect to enrolment are exceeding our forecast. The province continues to grow at an accelerated rate and that’s no different for our school boards.”
Each of 347 eligible public, separate, francophone, charter, ECS private operators and private school authorities in Alberta will receive a share of the $125 million, based on their number of students and level of need. The money can be used to hire teachers or educational assistants, or to ensure escalating operating costs don’t take away from student learning.
Nicolaides said some of the funds will go toward increasing grant rates, while another portion will go toward the supplemental enrolment growth grant, which is made available to school boards facing enrolment beyond forecasted projections.
“That will probably go mostly to our Calgary and Edmonton-area school boards,” he said. “They’re primarily seeing the largest increases in enrolment, so they’ll potentially be seeing the largest increase in operating funding.”
Nicolaides said the $90 million will fund the construction and installation of up to 100 new modulars and the relocation of 50 existing modulars in Calgary, Edmonton and Airdrie. He said the portables will add 2,500 new spaces for the 2024-25 school year — though he acknowledged most will not be ready by September.
“We’ll be looking very carefully with our school boards to have a look at where that need is the greatest, and we’ll obviously defer to their judgment of which schools have the highest utilization rate and which schools have the capacity for additional modulars,” Nicolaides said.
Many of Alberta’s school boards face record enrolment growth and overflowing classrooms. The Calgary Board of Education’s overall utilization rate reached 93 per cent this year, with the public school district’s grade 10 to 12 schools operating at 103 per cent capacity.
More than 150 of the CBE’s 250 schools are at capacity, a recent report found, and overflow schools have increased from eight in 2019-20 to 32 this past year, forcing thousands of students to attend schools outside their communities.
After the budget was released in February, Nicolaides announced the construction of 18 new schools to help alleviate space pressures in Calgary by adding 16,000 student spaces. But considering it will take a few years for those schools to be built, he said modulars are a “fast and effective” interim solution to take pressure off some of the city’s most crowded schools.
“We’ll be able to get new modulars on the ground as early as September and we anticipate we’ll be able to deliver approximately 100 modulars by the end of the calendar year,” he said. “We can move very quickly, the supplier can develop the units very quickly, and it can allow for quite an immediate alleviation of pressure in some of those highest-utilized schools.”
School enrolment pressures are also being experienced outside of Calgary city limits, including Cochrane and Chestermere.
Fiona Gilbert, the chair of Rocky View Schools’ (RVS) board of trustees, said the funding announced Tuesday is a needed boost for the public school division, which will receive $4 million toward operating costs.
RVS will also receive 12 new modular classrooms and funding to relocate 12 others. Gilbert said the district’s trustees will discuss this fall how to best allocate the new portables.
She added Tuesday’s announcement shows that the Alberta government is finally starting to hear the pleas of public education stakeholders who have been calling on the province to provide more funding.
“It’s a combination of advocating from all different stakeholders — parents, teachers, school boards and many other stakeholders — and I think it’s working to prioritize public education a little bit,” she said.
-With files from Eva Ferguson