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Originally Posted by you&me
My napkin math on the last page (or was it in the other thread? FFS) was more like 3%, but who's counting?
There are also about 40,000 private school students in the province and I've seen it stated that 700,000 students are affected by the ATA strike, so at that rate, ~6% of students receive ~3% of the funding.
Again, these are insignificant numbers in the scheme of things. Eliminating and redirecting the funding to private schools will achieve approximately the square root of #### all... especially once you factor in the number of students that would re-enter the public school population and need to be funded at the full rate.
The focus for parents of all students, whether public or private, should be adequate and proper funding for all students in Alberta.
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Currently it is $461M. Calling that "insignificant" is a deceptive comment. $461M is a big pot of money that could be going toward funding the public sector to do things like... pay the teachers. The UCP budget shows an increase of $55M next year for private schools and then $188M over the next two years. Private school funding is booming in the UCP's plan.
Charter schools represents another $66M in annual funding, but that doesn't count the $123M that the UCP gifted to private and charter schools on top of their operating budget.
All of these issues come back to the same root cause: The UCP is defunding and dismantling the public education system to enable more and more private schools (including Charters). You cannot ignore a part of the problem when it is clearly a significant part of their strategy.
Private schools do not get funding elsewhere in Canada and they do not need public funding in Alberta either. This isn't an "us vs. them" problem as much as it is aligning to the norm and stopping with giving handouts to (rich) people who can afford private education when the public education system is breaking down.
For those of you who are lucky enough to have kids in Private/Charter schools, the point should be to build up a strong enough public school system that has enough capacity and support to address the needs of all kids.