I keep seeing figures tossed around and I can't figure out what is being counted in the teacher count. From what I've seen there are 51,000 or so full and part time teachers, which I'm assuming includes Principals, Music Teachers, etc. and maybe admin staff?
If there's 700,000 ish kids in the Alberta system and class sizes of 30 per teacher on average right now, that would only be 23,000 - 24,000 full time teacher equivalents which is less than half of the 51,000 figure in the articles.
Can someone who knows the system better explain why there is such a discrepancy? And how small of a drop in the bucket 3,000 new teachers would even be if only half are being used to reduce classroom sizes?
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