Quote:
Originally Posted by Point Blank
I know this question has been answered already, but to give a bit more detail, yes. Every year, the principal has to reconcile funding with staffing, and funding is based on student enrollment projections determined by head office. Every spring, Principals have to determine how many staff to hire for the following school year based on staff to student ratio, as well as account for extra funding for specialized programs, such as EAL’s, international students, GATE, etc.
Based on that information, it would be pretty easy for an administrator to tell you classroom sizes. But since reporting in this particular point was ended by the UCP, we can only rely on anecdotes.
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This is mostly accurate. The catch is that funding within the CBE was centralized years ago. This is part of the problem. When this took place class size became very challenging to directly connect to funding or to track.
This is because we used to get funding according to the credits we earned with Alberta Ed. Then they took all of this and centralized it with the CBE. This is when they really pooched class size as they began counting all of these people as "student facing" that work downtown and never see a kid. This removed the limit that was placed by A. Ed. on administrative costs. In fact, they got called out by the NDP on hiding the cost of their new ivory tower rental downtown. The rental alone blew over the amount they are supposed to spend on administration. So they called all these downtown people principals and counted them as student facing funding. So, the kdis they would be in front of according to the funding wehre spread out over the actual studnet facing roles at schools. Uping the class sizes jsut to keep a bunch of people working downtown and avoid being embarassed by the government.
So this affects the CBE's tracking of class size. Then they use specialized programs with less than 10 kids in them (usually medically required small sizes, extremely high needs) to balance out their huge high school classes. Combing this with other trickery and you end up with misrepresented nubers all over the place.
Class size is huge, been 40 or higher for years in high school.