https://apple.news/AyzelBubJTRWoNQZZdW04Tw
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The raise, I understand. A little something to offset 2020s inflation and the growing challenges in the classroom is fair. The imposed 12 per cent over four years doesn’t go overboard, either; it certainly doesn’t match 20 per cent over four years that the nurses got in April, and it’s more than the provincial judges’ nine per cent raise over 2021-24.
But it gets fuzzy when you start to unpack the ATA’s other numbers. Yes, there are classes of 40 students and more, which should be unacceptable. But it’s not the norm: the number of 40-plus classes in Edmonton Public Schools was only 41 last school year, and of those, the largest had 56 students. Classes in the 35-40 band were more common, at 788. Most classes were within the 21-30 range. If Edmonton’s public board is an indicator for the rest, then the problem isn’t as bad as it might sound to the uninitiated. (We can’t know this for sure, because Alberta stopped publishing provincewide data in 2019.)
It’s also not necessarily the case that 40- to 50-person classes will have just one teacher. In a CBC report last week, for example, one Calgary parent lamented his kids’ classes of 45 — which had two teachers. That’s divisible into two classes of 22 and 23. If the amalgamation is the result of a space shortage, well, the Alberta government is already in the midst of building numerous new schools to accommodate the influx. Indeed, in Calgary, the public school board requested four new schools in its 2023-26 capital plan; four new schools for the board are currently under construction, with 11 others in the planning and design phase.
There’s no escaping the lag effect, as it takes longer to build a school for 600 kids than it does to bring 600 kids into Alberta, whether from another province or another country.
Then there’s the language front. Edmonton Public Schools’ proportion of English learners went from 14 per cent in 2021-22 to an estimated 16 per cent in 2024-25. That’s an average of about 85 students who are learning English in each school. In that same time, refugee students grew from two per cent of the student body to 2.5 per cent. Overall, the province has gone from 114,000 English-learning students in 2020 to 136,000 in 2021, with refugee students rising from 10,000 to 14,000. Students with disabilities are trending upward, too. This phenomenon can be observed across the country.
Teachers aren’t publicly complaining about this in large numbers — nor are their unions — but they do air their grievances anonymously on Reddit.
“I hate my job right now…. I teach junior high. My homeroom has 41 kids. We keep getting more,” wrote one Alberta teacher in September 2024. Twelve of this person’s students had disabilities of some sort, and “13 are (English language learners). 9 of these kids are brand new to Canada in the last year or two. Again no support. No pullouts. No literacy intervention. No resources.”
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I haven’t been following along much on the strike, but have tried to keep up a bit on CP.
If nurses received a 20% raise, maybe teachers should have received a bigger raise. Although most teachers seem to be saying it’s not about money, if they are getting paid more it would be easier to retain teachers and easier to hire more teachers.
Even though I have kids who have been missing out on school, I feel for the teachers on this one. It’s a tough spot to be put in when your class sizes are too large and you have an increasing number of students who have special needs and an increasing number who aren’t fluent in English.
High immigration numbers along with the Alberta Calling campaign have pushed class sizes higher, at a faster rate than the schools are getting built. I suspect it’s a problem that’s not exclusive to Alberta, but that doesn’t excuse it.