Alberta NDP says tracking class size and complexity needed to relieve jammed classrooms

The Alberta government should restore public reporting of class sizes and appoint a commission to set new class size and complexity standards, the NDP Opposition said.

The province should also track and report how many students with extra needs, such as disabilities or English language learners, teachers have in front of them, said Amanda Chapman, the NDP critic for children with disabilities.

Chapman tabled a private member's bill in the legislature last week proposing to restore a requirement for school authorities to report their class sizes and compositions to the province. The United Conservative Party government ended a class-by-class headcount requirement in 2019.

"To reduce the amount of information that you're receiving about the situation at hand as a decision maker — I just don't understand it," Chapman said.

In an emailed response to questions from CBC News, a spokesperson for Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides did not say on Tuesday whether the minister would support the bill.

Chapman said eliminating class size counts has left the government deciding about how to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on school funding and construction in an information void about where the need is greatest.

Her bill also proposes a new commission on learning excellence to set updated class composition standards based on current research. Guidelines were last established in the province 20 years ago when the Alberta Commission on Learning (ACOL) released its findings in 2003.

Should Chapman's bill pass, it would require the government to assemble a new nine-member commission every decade to recommend updated classroom standards to the education minister within two years.

Large, complex classes challenging to handle 

After the province lifted tracking requirements, Edmonton's public school board continued collecting and publishing data annually.

Its most recent report shows the average class sizes for Kindergarten to Grade 9 exceed the province's ACOL guidelines.

The number of students with mild, moderate and severe disabilities per classroom has increased during the last three years, as has the number of English language learners.

The average high school class sizes of the core subjects — math, English language arts, science and social studies —are all 28 or more students.

The report notes the pandemic may have affected some enrolment numbers.

Edmonton parent Lauren Pham has watched her four children's class sizes grow larger over the years. Her youngest daughter, Bella, 14, needs extra help with her core subjects — help that she can't find in her packed Grade 9 classes. Her west Edmonton school, David Thomas King, is full and has closed boundaries to new students.

"We just kept getting told, 'Sorry, you'll have to figure this out. We cannot do it,' " Pham said.

The family is now spending hundreds of dollars a month for Bella to work with a private tutor twice a week.

"I feel like our education system is failing them to the utmost," she said.

Jodi Skerratt, school council chair at Edmonton's Delwood school, said teachers and support staff there are taxed and burned out by the number of students with exceptional needs in large classes.

Skerratt also pays for a private tutor for her daughter, whose Grade 3/4 French immersion class has 28 students.

She welcomes the idea of new class composition standards.

"Things have changed so much for our kids now," she said. "We see much more complex needs in our children now than we did 20 years ago."

Superintendent wants focus on complexity

Alberta Teachers' Association president Jason Schilling said the ACOL guidelines are outdated because they didn't account for the varied needs teachers are grappling with.

He said a classroom space shortage and funding limits exacerbate the challenge.

Three years ago, the UCP government introduced a new school funding formula that some education advocates said punishes growing urban and suburban divisions by delaying full funding for new students.

During the last year, Edmonton Public Schools enrolment grew by 5,336 pupils to 115,176 students — a five per cent jump. Edmonton Catholic Schools welcomed 2,497 more students, pushing this year's enrolment up 5.5 per cent to 47,775.

Schilling said funding has not kept pace with growth or inflation.

"Government, by not collecting class size data, has essentially put their head in the sand and pretended that there's not an issue there," he said.

Sherwood Park-based Elk Island Public Schools superintendent Sandra Stoddard said Monday it would be most useful for the government to track class complexity rather than size.

The government's 2023-24 budget included a promise of $126 million over three years to help schools address complexity.

Stoddard's division received a little less than $900,000 to divvy among more than 17,000 students this year, she said. School administrators told her they need more resources to help students of low socioeconomic status with mental health problems and behavioural issues succeed in school.

She said it would be valuable if the province developed a funding formula for complexity based on actual counts of students with unique needs, similar to what the private member's bill proposes.

Enforceable class size caps, such as in B.C. or Ontario, would be more problematic, Stoddard said. At some crammed Alberta schools, there are no spare rooms to split a large class in two, she said.

In an email, Edmonton Catholic Schools spokesperson Christine Meadows described the need for more school space as "desperate." Nearly 40 per cent of the division's schools are over capacity. She said some schools use the learning commons and staff rooms as classrooms.

In a Tuesday email, Nicolaides' press secretary, Gabrielle Symbalisty, said the province's education budget increased five per cent from the last budget year. She said school boards receive and decide how to spend 98 per cent of that money, and could track class sizes to decide how best to allocate it. 

In addition to the classroom complexity funding, the 2023-24 provincial budget also included money for schools and divisions to hire 3,000 more classroom-based staff and 13 new school construction projects.

Symbalisty said Alberta's four largest school boards, in Edmonton and Calgary, have so far hired 1,236 additional teachers and 458 more educational assistants this year.