Another Hard Hit School Board in Alberta

An interesting article in the Medicine Hat News, "Schools hang on budget reprieve," talks about the particularly hard hit Prairie Rose School Division. Prairie Rose serves a geographically dispersed population that is mostly rural. They serve 3 380 students in 17 public schools, 1 Outreach School and 15 Hutterite Colony Schools. Their board has 8 trustees.

They are expecting a $2.7M shortfall as a result of the government's decision to eliminate a grant targeted to rural school divisions. Their MLA, Len Mitzel, comments in the article that the formula that was used does not work for districts like Prairie Rose.

The School Division is looking at cutting administration, teaching positions (up to 10%), and charging bussing fees for the first time.

Funding Public Education

Interesting background information on education funding in the province can be found in the article, "Funding Public Education: An excerpt from the Association's submission to Alberta's Commission on Learning," which currently appears on the ATA Web Extras' page. The following sheds some light on the challenges of large urban metro boards like Calgary's that have a higher proportion of ESL and Special Needs students (several years of no funding increases, some ESL targeted funding eliminated):

Neu, Taylor and Ocampo (“School District Deficits and Program Spending in Alberta,” Canadian Journal of Education Administration and Policy, June 2002) have observed that the funding formula contains a number of structural biases that produces disparities in the fiscal positions of boards. For example, inadequate funding for special education, English as a second language (ESL) and technology has forced boards to subsidize these programs by taking money from other areas of the budget. Because demands for special education and ESL are not uniform, boards serving populations having a high proportion of students requiring these programs are consistently disadvantaged.