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The Alberta government has introduced new legislation aimed at standardizing how local school authorities craft report cards for students.
The changes are as part of Bill 35: Securing Parental Involvement, which was unveiled Thursday by Minister of Education and Childcare Demetrios Nicolaides.
“I’m confident that these changes will help families stay informed and stay involved,” Nicolaides said during a news conference.
The bill also includes more avenues for parents to escalate disputes with school authorities and a requirement for public school boards to obtain ministerial approval for the naming or renaming of school buildings. Bill 35 also includes changes to parental notification for serious incidents at daycares.
The Ministry of Education and Childcare said Thursday the changes would amend the Education Act to strengthen accountability and improve transparency for parents.
Report card standards
The province said report card practices in Alberta vary across school authorities, which can result in different information reaching families about student performance as assessment and reporting are the responsibility of local school authorities.
The province’s new bill would amend the Education Act to define what a report card is.
The amendments would give authority to the education minister to establish standards for how report cards are issued.
In a technical briefing Thursday, provincial officials said the proposed amendments would improve consistency in how progress is reported without prescribing a single format.
“I do hear a lot of questions from parents around the one to four kind of grading system that a lot of school divisions use in elementary, and some continued confusion over what they what they mean,” Nicolaides said.
The proposed amendments would apply to public and separate school boards and francophone regional authorities.
The province said the standards are to be set out in a ministerial order and would be effective for the 2027-28 school year.
Parental input and professional development days
If passed, amendments to the Education Act would establish requirements for school authorities to develop a new process to receive and manage unresolved parent disputes and concerns.
The province said this will standardize how concerns are addressed given this process can vary across school boards.
“We will … be creating a provincewide portal for parent concerns or issues, and I believe that’s an important vehicle to help parents raise any concerns that they may have, and to ensure government is taking those concerns seriously,” Nicolaides said.
Meagan Parisian, president of Alberta School Councils’ Association, told CBC News she is largely in support of the measures put forward by the province but said the portal should receive ample consultation to be successful.
“What I think we don’t want this to turn into is an online vent session where everyone is ganging up on a particular school community or, you know, a particular individual,” Parisian said.
“From our understanding, that’s not what this portal is meant to do. This is meant to address high-level feedback on what folks are seeing within the classroom and within their school communities, not as an increased escalation opportunity.”
School authorities would also now have to provide more information to parents about activities conducted on non-instructional operational days, like professional development days.
The province said it would define what a “non-instructional operational day” is and require school authorities to provide public information related to all non-instructional operational day activities, within 60 days.
The proposed amendments would also apply to public and separate school boards, francophone regional authorities, charter school operators, and accredited independent school authorities.
Naming of school buildings
The province is also pursuing amendments to its legislation to ensure ministerial oversight occurs before significant public resources are invested in naming or renaming processes.
The province said once ministerial approval is granted, public school boards would continue to carry out local naming processes, including community engagement.
Presently the minister does have authority to refuse the final selected name for the school building.
If legislation is passed, the province said these changes would come into effect before the next school year.
A solution in want of a problem: ATA
Jason Schilling, Alberta Teachers’ Association president, told CBC News he struggles to see how the province is addressing meaningful issues teachers face in the classroom with these changes.
“A lot of things I saw in Bill 35 seem to be solutions in search of a problem,” Schilling said.
“When we talk about standards of report cards, not quite sure what the government is getting at in terms of what they are going to implement, I just hope that they take into account teachers’ expertise and what their thoughts are, because this directly will affect teacher work.
Parisian said she sees there is sometimes an undercurrent of distrust against the public education system and the province is trying to address that.
“When the ministry is making moves like these, particularly when it comes to creating clear processes and communication channels for families, what that says to me is that we really want to build trust within the school community and with our families, and that is of the utmost importance.”