Edmonton Public School Board cites 'broken' funding model, uses reserves to balance budget

Edmonton Public Schools can afford to add just four full-time teaching positions next year while it prepares for an influx of more than 3,000 new students.

Trustees repeatedly called the province's education funding formula "broken" as they unanimously approved a $1.35-billion budget for the upcoming 2024-25 school year.  It's about five per cent larger than this year's budget.

"This funding model is not in the best interest of students," said trustee Dawn Hancock. "And I hope that our government sees it and makes a change."

At issue is a provincial formula that uses a weighted moving average to determine how much school authorities receive for each student enrolled.

The education ministry uses school enrolment counts from the previous and current school years and a projected enrolment for the next school year to calculate per-student funding.

The approach was supposed to soften the blow for school divisions with declining enrolments, and temper the demands of school divisions experiencing hefty enrolment increases.

Edmonton Public Schools projects that 120,224 pupils will walk through the doors of its 214 schools by September 2024. That's nearly 6,000 more than were enrolled in September 2023, or a 5.2 per cent increase. Half of those new students have already trickled into classrooms during the current school year.

Division superintendent Darrel Robertson said each year that enrolment surges, finances are stretched thinner. If the September projection materializes, Edmonton public's enrolment will have grown by 18 per cent in five years.

The projected shortfall next year is equivalent to having 4,000 unfunded students, division officials said.

Class sizes will go up. And school leaders will have to make difficult choices about which students receive extra help in schools, Robertson said.

"Something needs to change," he said. "... I think that we can all agree that we must prioritize the future of children across the province."

The formula isn't the only factor eroding the division's spending power, officials told the board.

Insurance costs have more than doubled in the last five years. Utility costs are ballooning. And government grants to school boards do not account for these inflationary costs, chief financial officer Todd Burnstad said.

And although the province accounted for rising teacher salaries negotiated in collective agreements, it is not funding the increased benefit costs associated with those wage hikes, Burnstad said, setting the division back another $16 million.