Alberta change to student funding formula aims to ease classroom pressures

School enrolment and rising costs are putting pressure on Alberta schools, but economic uncertainty — including the on-again, off-again U.S. tariffs — prevented the province from spending more on classrooms, says the education minister.

"[The Alberta budget was] done with the backdrop of tariffs, which, at that time ... was a threat, but now, a reality," Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said in an interview last week.

The proposed 2025-26 budget would be the first year that planned spending for pre-kindergarten through Grade 12 education will exceed $10 billion.

A key change involves the enrolment-based funding formula.

In 2020, the United Conservative Party introduced a weighted moving average (WMA), which based funding on enrolment counts over a three-year rolling average.

It was intended to give a financial cushion to rural school divisions that were seeing drops in enrolment. But the formula became problematic when enrolment growth accelerated in urban and suburban school divisions, leaving them effectively education the equivalent of hundreds or thousands of students without funding.

The most recent budget, released on Feb. 27, replaced the WMA with a two-year average adjusted enrolment method. Under the new calculation, 70 per cent of funding is based on anticipated enrolment, with the remainder based on current student numbers, Nicolaides said.

"Moving to a two-year [calculation] is our attempt to hopefully strike the right balance to be able to get dollars to fast-growing school divisions in a much faster way, and also provide as much long-term stability as we possibly can to smaller school divisions," he said.

At Edmonton Public Schools, Alberta's second-largest school division, the change will reduce the number of unfunded students to the equivalent of 1,000, down from about 3,000, said board chair Julie Kusiek.

"Does it fully address our desire to have every single student funded? No, but that will continue to be a conversation that we have with government," Kusiek said.

A report received by board trustees last week said the student population is expected to grow by 4.1 per cent this year, with 125,173 students likely to be enrolled by Sept. 30. 

Impact on teachers and classrooms

The provincial budget promises a 4.5 per cent increase in operating funds. However, it also noted that costs are expected to rise by about 7.3 per cent.

"The chronic underfunding of public education in Alberta has created a crisis that can no longer be ignored, especially for students with special needs," said Alberta Teachers' Association president Jason Schilling.

Classroom conditions are deteriorating, he said. Some teachers can't get enough support to manage students with complex needs; others have 40 or more students and can't keep up with marking.

Some overwhelmed teachers want to leave the profession, he said.

Meanwhile, the province hopes to add 4,000 more teachers in three years.

According to Statistics Canada, Alberta has the lowest per-student funding of the 10 provinces. Schools would need 15.3 per cent more money to reach the Canadian per-student average, Schilling said.

Impact on rules for school buses

At the end of last year, Nicolaides changed the guidelines around school bus rides, meaning subsidies will be offered to students living more than 1.6 kilometres away from their school, up from one kilometre.

The change means an estimated 36,000 elementary students who would have been eligible for subsidized busing may no longer qualify this fall. About 13,000 of those students are already using yellow buses, according to the province.

Nicolaides said he made the change because some school divisions say they don't have the available buses and trained drivers to run as many routes as would be required.

The government is providing transition funding to help schools adjust to the change, he said.

At Edmonton Public Schools, about 1,500 students who currently ride yellow buses may not be eligible after the change, said Geoff Holmes, the division's transportation manager.

But the division isn't booting kids to the curb yet. "Our goal would be to try to continue to provide the one-kilometre service as long as we feasibly can," he said.

Impact on private schools

As part of a promised $8.6-billion School Construction Accelerator Program (SCAP), Alberta plans to launch a pilot program that would partially fund the construction of some private school buildings.

In 2023-24, there were 800,038 total students in Alberta, including public, private, charter, home and other learning environments. That number is projected to climb by about five per cent, or 43,000 students, in the next three years, said Nicolaides' press secretary, Garrett Koehler.

In contrast, the number of students in private schools could grow as much as eight per cent by next fall, Alberta education officials told a budget technical briefing.

John Jagersma, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges in Alberta (AISCA), said members have asked for conditional grants that would require independent schools to put in $2 for every provincial dollar, or a similar commitment, he said.

With provincial funding, AISCA members think private schools could add 10,000 to 15,000 more seats in the next few years, Jagersma said.

Nicolaides said the pilot isn't yet developed, and there is no money budgeted for it this year.

However, the budget did provide an increase in operating funding for private schools, most of which receive 70 per cent of the per-student funding received by public schools.

Government budget estimates show that private schools, excluding early childhood services, are slated to receive nearly $295 million to operate, which would be a nearly 16 per cent increase in funding from the previous year — and a 42 per cent funding increase since 2023-24.

ATA president Schilling called the larger funding increase unfair; Nicolaides said it is based on the growth in projected enrolment.