Poor planning underpins Alberta government's fast-track school building program, NDP says

Education critic Amanda Chapman said the UCP is years late in taking action on a problem it should have seen coming. (Supplied/Alberta NDP)

The UCP’s fast-tracked school building program reveals a flawed approach to public education and provincial governance, the NDP’s education critic charged last week.

The $8.6-billion investment in school spaces is certainly needed, said Amanda Chapman. But the announcement underlines poor planning from a government that should have seen an overcrowding crisis coming and acted before it arrived, she said.

“It’s like they're just pinging back and forth from crisis to crisis,” said Chapman, the member for Calgary-Beddington. “I'm not seeing a lot of forethought. I'm not seeing a lot of planning.”

• The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App

First announced in a Sept. 17 televised address by Premier Danielle Smith, the School Construction Accelerator Program more than triples previously announced spending of $2.1 billion. The province estimates up to 30 new schools, and up to eight modernizations and replacements will be approved every year for three years.

Along with 50,000 spaces previously approved, the program jumpstarts more than 100,000 new student spaces and 16,600 modernized spaces, plus 20,000 student spaces in new or relocated modular classrooms. Also envisioned are 12,500 new student spaces for public charter schools, along with a pilot program to help build independent, not-for-profit schools.

The government immediately announced 10 qualifying approvals in the three categories of construction, design and planning. All six construction approvals are for sites beyond the Edmonton-Calgary corridor — Barrhead, Breton and Mallaig in central Alberta, Redcliff and Taber in southern Alberta, and Wainwright in east-central Alberta.

Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides told The Macleod Gazette that the crisis was harder to predict than the NDP describes. Population growth in Alberta reached more than 200,000 people in 2023, an influx widely considered unprecedented in the province’s history.

“What we've seen happen has been a really sudden and significant increase in population and in student enrollment,” said Nicolaides, the member for Calgary-Bow. “So we spent time over the spring and summer looking at ways in which we would be able to deal with this growth and develop this plan so that we can build schools as quickly as possible.”

About 4.7 million people called Alberta home in 2023, compared with about 4.5 million the year before. As of the second quarter of 2024, Statistics Canada estimated new growth for the year so far totalling 46,200 people. Back in 2020, about 4.4 million people lived in the province.

Chapman said the government did its best to boost Alberta’s population but didn’t plan for infrastructure consequences. She told The Gazette: “This is the government that ran a campaign enticing people to move to Alberta. We (the NDP) spent an entire year in the legislature last year flagging the issue of overcrowding in classrooms, and the response from the government every single time was, well, Alberta is calling, our population is booming.”

She continued: “And they're right. Our population is booming, and I question why the government didn't plan for the infrastructure that we would need to accommodate all the people that we’re calling to come to Alberta. We told people to come here, to bring their families, that this is a place where they could make a life and have a good quality of living. And we didn't think ahead to where their kids were going to go to school.”

Alberta Education data show that kindergarten-to-Grade 12 enrolment increased about 5.2 per cent from 2022/23 to 2023/24 in the province’s public, separate, francophone and charter schools. That’s an increase from about 694,000 to about 730,000 students. Figures for this school year aren’t publicly available yet.

The accelerator program floats the idea of helping independent non-profit schools with public capital investment. Said a Sept. 18 news release from the province: “Independent schools offer specialized learning supports as well as religious and cultural programming to support parental and educational choice. Alberta’s government will continue to explore opportunities for a school capital pilot program for non-profit independent schools to broaden learning options for Alberta families.”

Nicolaides said the schools already play a role in education in Alberta as the province grapples with growth, calling them “partners in the private education space.” The schools fill niches that public schools can’t fill on their own.

He pointed to program unit funding, or PUF, which puts public money towards the education of toddlers-to-kindergarten-aged children with certain special needs. Most of the students receiving the money attend private, early childhood services operations or independent schools, Nicolaides said.

But Chapman said the answer is more money for public education, not turning to private schools. “The public school system has to accept every child who comes, and it is the UCP’s responsibility to meet the needs of that child in the public system. That's not happening right now,” she said.

Relying on private schools points to problems of overcrowding, she said, along with a need for educational assistants, speech language pathologists and other specialists that allow students to integrate.

“The vast majority of Albertans choose public education for their children, and that is where we should be seeing funding go — public dollars for public education.”

Nicolaides said making capital investments in independent schools is being explored and nothing has been developed or designed yet. Among those ideas already floated is the government providing matching grants, which would require non-profit, independent schools to put up a share of the funding.

But everything is early days. “It’s just a pilot to see if it's something that works and if it's something that's viable,” the minister said, adding that he’s about to start going through ideas in more detail with department officials.