[b1crunch]

I live and work in rural Alberta as a teacher. The UCP has huge amounts of support in my community and the current UCP MLA in my riding will win his seat again no doubt. But the UCP has been especially terrible for rural Alberta in an educational sense. This isn't stuff that I necessarily see in the news, so I thought I'd share.

The UCP and Lagrange (and Kenney when he was still in power) love to comment how they maintained educational funding during their tenure. This is a half-truth. They maintained the funding that schools receive for the kids, but cut funding in all other sorts of ways. For example:

-The UCP reduced bus budgets, which really hurt rural Alberta schools who depend so heavily on bus service to farms and acreages.
-The UCP reduced funding for CTS (Mechanics, Woodworking, Art, Foods) which rural kids (and all of Alberta) often love. The Mechanics and Welding programs in my school are incredibly popular, but we had to start charging large fees for these programs to make up for the loss in funding.
-The UCP cut ADLC (Alberta Distance Learning). This was a program run out of a rural area (Pembina) and greatly benefitted rural schools and rural students. Kids in my school love to get jobs in town as welders, mechanics, etc and do their course work through modules through ADLC. Well, the UCP cut this altogether. ADLC was literally created so small rural schools could offer a wide range of programs that are often offered in big city schools. But the UCP cut it? This is terrible for rural Alberta and now our schools are scrambling to find fixes, which cost tons of money, for which the UCP aren't offering any. By the way, they cut the distance learning program in 2020, literally in the middle of the pandemic. lol
-The UCP reduced funding for special needs students. My cousin who lives in a small town in northern Alberta, has a daughter that was born with a chromosome missing. It impacts her muscle mass, coordination and ability to reason. She basically needs 1 on 1 support all the time because she's too weak to walk most days and struggles with basic tasks. Pre-UCP her school provided 1 on on 1 support. But when the UCP did the cuts her school cut the 1 on 1 support, and it's a major problem. The same is true in my school, but my school took a different approach. We kept the EA supports and let go of a few teachers, and our class sizes ballooned to 40-50 kids in some classes. The province's own recommendations for class-sizes (which came from the previous PC's) was a max of 27 in a high school classroom. My schools currently has classes with students in the high 40's. It's ridiculous.

Big city schools are more easily able to overcome these issues because they have large student populations and get lots of funding for their kids, which they can move around. But the smaller rural schools cannot do the same. For us in rural Alberta it's meant, cuts to services, cuts to programs, large increases in class sizes and more costs to parents.

Yet, most of the people in my community know nothing of these issues because they don't make the news, and generally blame the issues at the school as evidence that teachers, and government, in general, are lazy and need to be privatized. This is the general consensus view I hear from those around me. It's disappointing because the very people who will vote UCP are being harmed in so many small ways by them.