Judi Hunter – Ward 5 Trustee
Our wonderful summer will soon be only a memory. Soon our youth will be returning to school and a year of activities and commitments begin again. I hope that each you have enjoyed some family time and the opportunity to rejuvenate in preparation for another busy school year.
The Government of Alberta is moving to a digital assessment platform. With this, students will see more multimedia-rich, interactive content and will be able to demonstrate their knowledge and skills in different ways. The new platform will offer a wider range of built-in learning supports and accommodations, resulting in an improved, more inclusive test-taking experience for students. The new platform will also streamline the process schools use to administer provincial assessments. The province is phasing in this approach. For the 2023/24 school year, school authorities can participate in a variety of optional implementation activities.
The 2023-2024 will not be without its challenges for the Board and our families. Each September, RVS welcomes between 750 and 1,000 new students. Many of our schools are already over capacity, and our students and teachers are being negatively impacted as a result. RVS continues to be creative in how we use our existing space, but the situation is rapidly becoming untenable.
Our students come from rural and urban communities, some of which have been experiencing exploding population growth for several years. For instance, Airdrie’s population grew by 14.29 per cent from 2019 to 2023. With population growth comes increased school enrolment. During the 2022/23 school year, the utilization rate for all RVS schools was 91 per cent up from 87 per cent in 2021/22. The result is crowded classrooms and the need to repurpose non-instructional spaces into classrooms.
RVS is urging the Government to move all four projects approved in the Budget 2023 from the design, planning or pre-planning stage to construction in Budget 2024. The last K-8 school to open in Airdrie was Northcott Prairie School in 2019. W.H. Croxford High School, which opened in 2014, was the most recent high school to be opened in Airdrie. By the academic year 2022/23, it had reached a utilization rate of 109 percent. With an additional 833 students expected in Airdrie in September 2023, the Board will have to look at adjusting grade levels and attendance areas across the city to help address the space crunch. These changes will impact thousands of our families.
Another issue impacting RVS, and its students, families and staff is how funding for public education is determined in Alberta. In 2019, a weighted moving average (WMA) funding model was introduced. For a rapidly growing division such as RVS, the WMA model, with its three-year average system, leaves the division with a significant shortfall in instructional funding.
The WMA model means a total of 802 RVS students will not be funded by the provincial government for the upcoming 2023/24 school year, resulting in a loss of $5,625,163 for RVS. The Board approved allocating $1 million from reserves to help offset this shortfall but is unable to do more without depleting already stretched reserves. The result of WMA is even more crowded classrooms due to a lack of funding to hire new teachers to teach those 802 additional students. In what could be described as a “perfect storm,” we are also challenged to find space for these students because we have not had sufficient new schools approved for the division. RVS is working with government to address this concern.
Despite ongoing funding and space issues, each year our staff welcomes our young people and strives to provide the best learning opportunities for them. Each year, our parents work to support the efforts of our schools and each year our young people show up ready to take on another year. Educating our next generation of citizens takes the efforts of all of us. I am honored to be part of this process.
