The UCP vows to invest in up to 30 new school projects and eight modernizations every year for the next three years
The UCP government touted its $8.6-billion plan to add more K-12 student spaces at a Calgary high school Wednesday, vowing to address historic growth across Alberta as record numbers of new families move here.
But critics say the plan doesn’t do enough to address immediate enrolment pressures, and offers desperate school boards too little too late in an education system that has suffered funding shortfalls for years.
On the heels of a taxpayer-funded TV address Tuesday, Premier Danielle Smith was at Western Canada High School on Wednesday, reiterating that the UCP will invest in up to 30 new school projects and eight modernizations every year for the next three years as part of a new School Construction Accelerator Program.
In addition to the school projects, 20,000 new student spaces will be delivered through modular classrooms over the next four years.
Overall, the K-12 system will see up to 50,000 new or modernized student spaces over the next three years — and more than 150,000 new spaces over the following four years.
“Every student deserves a quality education in a school that can meet their learning needs and set them on a path to success in the future,” said Smith.
“As hundreds of thousands of people are choosing to make Alberta their home, we are responding by funding and building the schools our fast-growing communities need.”
But student advocates say the funding comes too late, after three years of historic enrolment growth in urban centres combining newcomers from across the globe with Canadians from other provinces, many in response to an Alberta advantage promoted by the UCP.
“This government has neglected public schools and school boards for years. Time and time again they’ve refused their cries for help,” said Medeana Moussa, spokeswoman for the Support Our Students advocacy group.
“They’ve neglected to fund resources, to fund new teachers, and to keep up with all of the rising demands we’ve been seeing for quite some time.
“We’ve had a huge influx of people, not only because of immigration but in big part due to the marketing push by this government, yet they haven’t invested in that growth.
“And why just focus on student spaces? We need teachers, we need support staff, we need resources.”
The Alberta Teachers’ Association agreed, saying new schools are welcome, but this week’s announcement does little to address space crunches and the lack of staff in schools now.
“They’re announcing new schools to be finished three or four years down the road. But we have overcrowded classrooms right now,” said ATA president Jason Schilling.
“We have students learning in boot rooms, in gymnasiums, in staff rooms . . . and we have teachers leaving the profession because they are so overworked and burned out.”
Schilling added that the $125 million in additional operating funds committed by the province over the summer is “a drop in the bucket” compared to the $1.2 billion needed to ensure manageable class sizes.
“Now we are adding tens of thousands of new spaces with no acknowledgment that we also need teachers.”
On Wednesday, Smith said the program will speed up the construction of schools by enabling projects to be approved in-year for the next stage in the construction process without having to wait for a new budget cycle.
All previously approved school projects currently in the planning and design stages can move forward to the next stage as soon as they are shovel-ready.
That means 10 previously announced priority projects are now approved for the next step of project delivery, including six moving to full construction, Smith confirmed.
But the Calgary Board of Education stressed that historic growth has created an urgent demand for at least 13 new schools in the next year, with all sites shovel ready, as well as 21 new schools needed in the next three years.
“We have welcomed more than 143,000 students this school year, an increase of more than 5,000 compared to last year, and our utilization is 96 per cent. Our schools are full,” said CBE chair Patricia Bolger.
“Families in Calgary expect all these projects to be fully funded so students can attend school closer to home,” Bolger said, adding the CBE will need at least 40 schools in the next 10 years just to manage expected growth.
Bolger also said the CBE is struggling with aging schools desperately needing maintenance and modernization — with up to 56 per cent now at least 50 years old — and that number is set to climb to more than 70 per cent in the next decade.
The accelerator program is also supporting the expansion of charter schools, which are independently run, but publicly funded schools that often limit access and class sizes through waiting lists.
The UCP said it will add 12,500 new charter school student spaces over the next four years through a Charter School Accelerator pilot program.
Smith also said the province will explore opportunities for a “school capital pilot program” for private, non-profit schools to broaden options for Alberta families.
But Moussa called the growing commitment to charter and private schools, which are unavailable to the majority of Alberta kids, an unethical use of taxpayer dollars.
“This government is taking public funds, collected through taxes, and giving them to privately run, privately managed entities with no oversight by publicly elected trustees.”