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'Not sustainable': Edmonton Public worries school staff hiring being funded by reserves, not provincial support

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While the province is promising schools will be staffed with hundreds of more teachers and support staff this upcoming school year, the Alberta Teachers' Association and school boards believe that commitment falls short.

On Wednesday, Education Minister Adriana LaGrange shared a series of funding commitments the province was making to help Alberta classrooms for the next school year, including authorizing school boards to spend reserve funds to hire staff.

LaGrange celebrated that staffing projections show more than 1,600 staff will be hired in the province in the next academic year, including up to 800 more teachers and principals and 800 more support staff.

According to the education ministry, that represents a 2.2 per cent increase in certified staff compared to last school year and 3.1 per cent more classroom-based educational and teacher assistants.

All of those teaching positions will largely be covered through school boards using $88 million in reserve funds, CTV News Edmonton confirmed with the ministry.

LaGrange declined CTV News' request for an interview, but her spokesperson Erin Allin provided a statement saying that as of Aug.31 last year, school boards reported $464 million in operating reserves, an increase of $81 million from the previous year.

"School authorities are responsible for hiring decisions," Allin added. "We would expect that many of the new staff have already been hired."

"By the end of the 2022-23 school year, maximum operating reserved amounts will be set for school boards," Allin said. "To ensure public dollars go to educational purposes in the same year the funding is provided."

For Trisha Estabrooks, Edmonton Public Schools board chair, that is not setting the province's 61 districts up for success.

"We are dipping into our reserves to help pay for some of the enrolment pressures that we anticipate in our schools this coming fall," Estabrooks told CTV News.

AUTONOMY QUESTION

The president of the union representing teachers in Alberta believes school boards should be able to spend school reserves without government approval, calling LaGrange's announcement simply a stop-gap measure.

"To me, there is no new money here," said Jason Schilling, Alberta Teachers' Association president. "This is money that is already used in the system."

"We are learning about positions that were lost during the pandemic re-instated," Schilling said. "(Using reserves) doesn't really address the long-term issues that we are seeing within our classrooms for our students and our teachers."

"Boards have acquired reserves for particular reasons, and now they're having to ask the government to use those reserves where they find it appropriate."

'A BROKEN FUNDING MODEL'

While Estabrooks welcomes the flexibility of using reserve money, she believes staffing funding should come directly from the province.

"We are using reserve dollars to pay for what, quite frankly, we have been saying for years now, is a broken funding model that doesn't adequately fund growing school divisions, such as Edmonton Public," she added. "Reserves are really intended for unexpected costs.

"We should not, as school divisions, be using our reserves to pay for the day-to-day operations of our school divisions. That's not a sustainable way forward."

While final tallies will be settled at the end of September, Estabrooks says EPSB estimates 107,000 kids to attend one of the 214 schools in the district — an anticipated 2.7 to 2.8 per cent enrolment growth.

"We may receive more kids than that," she added. "We need to staff at a level that reflects the growth of our division."

In Wednesday's announcement, LaGrange re-announced a $7 million enrolment grant for school jurisdictions laid out in the province's latest budget.

It will be allocated based on school authority actual enrolment, Allin explained, using three funding formulas. Separate rates will compensate school authorities for experiencing two per cent more students, between two and five per cent, and growth rates exceeding five per cent.

The higher the enrolment growth, the more dollars schools will receive, Allin added.

"(That's) a re-announcement," Estabrooks said. "If it is in the funding manual, we have dissected that."

"Any sort of additional money would be welcome," she added. "(But) $7 million for additional funding for enrolment growth spread over 61 school divisions (in Alberta), that doesn't go very far."

Edmonton Public estimates that 1,700 students attending this year will not be funded through the province.

"That's the size of a large high school that we are not receiving funding for," Estabrooks added. 

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Chelan Skulski

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