Last February, the Auditor General of Alberta released a report criticizing Alberta Education for consistently failing to meet the class size targets laid out by the Alberta Commission on Learning (ACOL) over a decade and a half ago.
He pointed out that the province had spent approximately $2.7 billion over the years on the Class Size Initiative, but average class sizes were growing and only five of the province’s 61 school boards had met the K-3 target of 17 students per classroom the previous year.
In essence, he said that Class Size Initiative funding had morphed into base instructional funding.
This has obviously spurred a fair bit of media coverage about how school divisions are failing to meet these targets. In November, there was a lengthy investigative piece published in the Edmonton Journal about how school boards were failing to reduce class sizes to recommended levels.
But when you’ve covered school board for as long as I have — about seven or eight years — you begin to realize how little that matters.
First, it seems that hardly anyone even remembers what the rationale was for the ACOL targets in the first place.
What’s the reason K-3 classrooms should be limited to just 17 students? Why should Grade 4-6 classrooms be limited to 23 students, or 25 students in Grades 7-9?
There might have been good evidence-based reasons for the targets at one time, but even after I skimmed the ACOL report from 2003, I couldn’t find them.
Secondly, the targets don’t seem to take into account the reality of enrolment figures in rural school divisions.
Pembina Hills Public Schools has consistently met the ACOL targets for every grade except K-3 classrooms for nearly a decade now, including the current school year.
Why do they keep hitting every target except the K-3 one? Because enrolments are already low; there are schools in this division where they likely don’t have more than 20-some students in their entire junior high.
Conversely, the K-3 target is so low that even the small schools has no choice but to exceed it. Let’s say there’s a PHPS school with 20 students in Grade 1.
Splitting that into two groups is unfeasible, so what are they going to do with those three students that are over the line? Move them up to Grade 2? Kick them out entirely?
So the Class Size Initiative lacks relevance, at least in the context of our local division. But don’t get me wrong: I’m NOT calling for the province to cut that funding.
The sad thing is, our underfunded public school divisions are now reliant on that grant, which has basically mutated into base instructional funding, as I noted earlier.
And they DO use it to keep class sizes in check, at least in Pembina Hills’ case. It’s just not necessarily being applied at the K-3 level, but rather at the higher grades.
Don’t be concerned that PHPS isn’t meeting the K-3 target; it’s not really a big deal.
