If high school chemistry teacher Alicia Taylor gets her wish, Albertans will vote in a referendum on whether to end public funding for independent schools.
“I think it’s wrong to have the highest rate of funding for private schools in a province where we have the lowest rate of funding for public schools,” the Calgary teacher said in an interview on Tuesday.
Last month, Taylor applied to Elections Alberta to petition for a referendum on the practice of using public funds to operate independent schools — also called private schools.
Elections Alberta announced on Tuesday it has approved her initiative petition question. The agency will spend the next week giving public notice that the initiative was approved, and on Oct. 14, Taylor can begin collecting signatures.
The question she posed is, “Should the government of Alberta end its current practice of allocating public funds to accredited independent (private) schools?”
The application was greeted with disappointment by the non-profit organization supporting the province’s independent schools.
“It’s a public petition that gets put out without any discussion or any opportunity for us to present context to it,” said John Jagersma, executive director of the Association of Independent Schools and Colleges in Alberta (AISCA).
Taylor is also a Calgary district representative on the Alberta Teachers’ Association’s governing council, but said she started the petition as an individual.
The Citizen Initiative Act gives a petition’s proponent 120 days to gather signatures in support of the proposal. Taylor must get 10 per cent of the number of electors who voted in the last provincial general election in 2023 to sign the petition for Elections Alberta to consider it.
Based on the number of voters in the last election, Taylor would need to gather more than 177,000 signatures.
Should Elections Alberta decide Taylor has gathered enough signatures, it will forward the petition to the Speaker of the legislature. MLAs are then left to decide whether to prepare a policy proposal, or refer the question back to Elections Alberta for a referendum.
The provincial government’s move last spring to lower the number of signatures required to petition for a referendum — and to extend the time to be able to gather them — motivated Taylor to apply, she said.
Taylor said she was also inspired by the momentum behind the Forever Canada petition to gather signatures in support of a referendum question on Alberta remaining part of Canada.
It was a coincidence — but a useful one, Taylor said — that the petition can move ahead as Alberta teachers engage in a provincewide strike.
“It’s early days, but I already have people ready to apply to collect signatures, and just people with a little more spare time than normal that are really interested in helping out,” she said.
Independent school funding growing
The provincial strike, and impending lockout, of 51,000 public, Catholic and francophone school teachers, has thrust discussions about school funding and classroom conditions to the fore.
School trustees and critics have said for years that provincial government funding for schools wasn’t keeping pace with population growth or inflation, leaving school boards to trim expenses. Many urban and suburban school buildings are also jammed beyond capacity.
Teachers say they are left with too many students in each class, with growing numbers of pupils who have varied needs, such as those still learning the English language and others with disabilities or medical challenges. They also say they do not have enough extra staff to meet those needs.
The total provincial kindergarten to Grade 12 education budget this year is nearly $9.9 billion. The province has allocated $461 million of that, or about five per cent, to fund independent schools.
Alberta Education gives independent schools 70 per cent of the per-student funding that a public school receives. It is the highest level of private school subsidization in the country.
A preliminary enrolment count last school year — the most recent data available — tallied 48,024 K-12 students in independent schools, and another 8,170 students in private early childhood education programs that receive education funding.
Together, they made up nearly seven per cent of Alberta students.
Enrolment in independent schools has gone up over the last five years, as has the proportion of total students attending them, which has led to an increasing amount of public funding going to the schools.
Independent schools worry they are scapegoats
Jagersma said he knows Albertans are frustrated at the state of education funding in the province, and worries independent schools could be unfairly blamed.
“We might just be a landing spot, I think, unintentionally, for some of those frustrations,” he said.
John Jagersma is executive director of the Association for Independent Schools and Colleges in Alberta (AISCA). He’s disappointed to see a petition pushing to defund private schools. (Submitted by John Jagersma)
Jagersma said Alberta has funded independent schools since the 1970s and they are an established part of the province’s education system. Families have fundraised and donated to build or renovate the schools, he added.
Jagersma said the average household income of 80 per cent of families with children in private schools is lower than the provincial average.
Most of the private early childhood education schools run programs for young children with disabilities, he said, which account for about half of such programs in the province.
“You’re pulling away the scaffolding and the support pieces for these kids within those young developmental years,” Jagersma said.
Although some of the schools charge tuition, many of them depend on public funding, and would likely close if that were to end, he said. Alberta’s public school system does not have space for 50,000 extra students, Jagersma added.
Taylor said the public education system should have appropriate funding to properly support all learners’ needs.
Wing Li, communications director for the advocacy group Support Our Students Alberta, said she was pleased to see the petition going ahead.
She said the rate of growth in funding for independent schools far outstrips budget increases for public schools, which isn’t right when private schools have other avenues to generate revenue.
Li pointed to Ontario, where independent schools still operate without receiving public funding.
She said she hopes a petition raises more awareness that public funding goes to independent schools.
“It’s really an unpalatable practice that our province has, because we see the dire straits that the public underfunding has left the bulk of K-12 students in,” Li said.