WESTLOCK - No more per-student funding and fewer grants will lead to more money in classrooms, promises the provincial government, but local school divisions say they have to wait for actual numbers before they can be certain.
As per the new K-12 funding formula, the existing 36 grants have been cut down to 15 to reduce red tape, which makes for a predictable, sustainable and efficient model, said provincial education minister Adriana LaGrange during a Feb. 18 press conference.
The previous grants have instead been combined to allow flexibility for school divisions to allocate funding based on their individual needs.
Things like English/French as a Second Language, First Nations, Métis and Inuit education, and Program Unit Funding will retain their individual grants, with the addition of a separate refugee grant. Other specialized learning funds have been combined under broader category grants.
The changes will take effect in the 2020-21 school year, when school divisions will no longer receive grant money on a per student basis.
Instead, a new weighted moving average combines enrolment numbers for the previous school year (actual), the current one (estimate), and projections for the upcoming at 20, 30, and 50 per cent respective weight.
Funding for high schools will change from the credit-based model to an enrolment one, where the weighted formula applies. Because Grades 10-12 have more needs than lower grades, those schools will receive 10 per cent more in funding.
The new formula is intended to give certainty to school divisions to plan according to the actual dollars they receive without revisiting budgets based on updated numbers. The weighted average-based funding will be allocated in the spring previous to the start of the school year.
The reduction in school grants doesn’t mean a reduction in funds, added LaGrange.
“Because our new model streamlines operations and pushes more dollars to school boards, every school board in this province will see an increase in funding for the upcoming school year,” she said.
While the weighted moving average is a significant change in how funding is allocated, particularly in the case of schools with enrolment growth, there is one significant factor that has school divisions reluctant to comment on LaGrange’s claims about the effects of this new formula: no number figures are attached to each individual grant.
“Until we see the budget numbers that go with the funding model it is difficult to determine whether the funding will be adequate, as well as predictable and sustainable,” said Pembina Hills School Division chair Jennifer Tuininga via e-mail.
“In the guiding principles the funding model does take into account the long-term viability of rural schools which is of importance to Pembina Hills.”
The government is maintaining that under the new model, more money will go toward classrooms, but since Budget 2020 won’t be released until Feb. 27, the dollar amounts are unknown. The only budget-related information had to do with overall provincial spending for education is the number will remain $8.223 billion, LaGrange said, which was announced in the 2019 budget when the figure was frozen for four years.
“Right now, it looks like everything is there, nothing glaringly jumps out at us as being problematic, but we don’t have any numbers attached to any of these words,” said Mike Paonessa, Supt. with Evergreen Catholic Separate School Division.
Plus, the changes visible with this new framework are mainly in administrative costs, so it’s difficult to gauge how school divisions will receive more money.
As it happened last year, the total amount is not quite reflective of how the money gets spread around, which is why divisions are reluctant to predict the impact. When the UCP government announced a freeze in overall education spending in 2019 (and not a reduction), individual school divisions still experienced significant shortfalls in their budgets, primarily from different money allocations which led to the loss of three major grants.
Pembina Hills now has a $2.5 million budget shortfall, and Evergreen Catholic announced $2.7 million in lost funding for 2019-20.
“When I first heard in the fall (of 2019) that there wasn’t any cut to any budgets … I thought ‘Oh, that’s good news,’ and then an hour later … my treasurer phones me and says we’re out $2 million … Once we dug into it and found out there were other areas they had to cover off, it made sense,” said Paonessa.
So while the province was promising the same amount of money, reality on the ground, across most divisions in the province, was money lost.
“The key will be how much we get in (as a division). That’s why I’m really focused on that bottom-line number, because if (it) is … similar to two years ago, not to what it was last fall, then we can make it work,” said Paonessa.
Complaints were levied from the press gallery to the minister that this announcement, with nothing factual behind the promise that it will lead to more money in classrooms, was no more than a political calculation on the part of LaGrange.
Rural school funding
Embedded in the new formula is a recognition that rural schools have different needs.
Under base instruction grants, rural schools have now been separated from general Kindergarten, Grades 1-9 and high school.
What the new formula means by ‘rural’ is a school with enrolment numbers below 155, not all schools within a rural division. Those schools classified as ‘rural’ under that definition will be privy to a seven-tier block funding per number of students enroled, not the weighted moving average.
Tier 1 is for schools under 35 students, and each tier advances at 20-student increments (Tier 2 houses 36-55, Tier 3, 56-75, etc.). Hutterite schools are under a separate category.
“If you go under a per student funding model, it doesn’t give you enough money to run that school if they are small populations. Despite the population of the school, you still have overheads, you still have custodians, you still have to turn the lights on,” said education press secretary Colin Aitchison after the conference.
Within Pembina Hills, those would be the Hutterite colony schools in Pibroch and Sunny Bend, Busby School, Dunstanble and Fort Assiniboine, according to a PHSD enrolment document from Sept. 30, 2019.
Evergreen Catholic has no schools at or under 155 students, confirmed Paonessa, but he’s still not sure if the ‘rural’ category applies to any school in that division. That’s because within the new ‘rural’ category, there are significant differences.
For example, Busby School offers K-6 and has 107 students (up from 99 in Sept. 2018), said principal Angie Bachand. By comparison, Pembina North Community School, a K-9 program, has 204 (down from 220 in 2018/19) according to principal Raime Drake.
Busby School is considered a ‘rural’ school, but PNCS is not, according to the new funding model. As of now, there is no indication that grade levels offered is another layer of that calculation.
Schools like Westlock Elementary, R.F. Staples, St. Mary and Eleanor Hall will follow the weighted moving average and not the ‘rural school’ tiered block funding model.
Since those schools, despite being larger, are still rural by geographical definitions, it’s unclear what sorts of funds will be available and whether or not they go toward addressing their needs.
Paonessa added that there was funding in the past, according to a school’s distance from urban centres, that allowed divisions to access additional supports like professional development for teachers. As the grant breakdown stands now, he’s not sure if those funds still exist.
Andreea Resmerita, TownandCountryToday.com
Follow me on Twitter @andreea_res
