Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Education
Capsule view of education in Alberta since 2019:
Before 2019, schools were funded based on students in seats as of September 30th.
2020 LaGrange takes over and rolls out AEM Average enrollment, last year @ 20%, Current year estimated @ 30% and Next year projected @ 50%. In 2024, EPSB had over 4000 unfunded students. https://www.alberta.ca/k-to-12-education-funding-model
Chronic underfunding of education to 2025
Fired 26,000 educational/support workers in a tweet in March of 2020.
Canceled the Pre-School programs for at-risk children that had been started with the NDP.
Shredded the Conservative/NDP curriculum and redid it in one year -copying much of it from other jurisdictions (USA). Went from world-renowned curriculum to being avoided. (Fine Arts and Social having to be rewritten - Jason Kenney’s Grandfather’s song highlighted in the music curriculum)
New Curriculum: unrolled K-6 with little to no inservicing or resources in all grades, all at once. Corrected this with the Social rewrite by introducing it to Grades 1-3 and the following year to 4-6. (still inappropriate - Grade 2 is learning the previous Grade 5 curriculum, regarding Canada.)
Shut down Alberta Distant Learning - an amazing resource used all over the world, with curriculum development available for all school boards in Alberta. A blessing to rural school boards for materials to use with students.
Canceled contract with Alberta Health - special needs support, like: Speech and Language, Occupational and Physical Therapy, Mental Health, and other supports.
(In fact, to get mental health support, families have to show up to an office, register, and wait in line hoping their child will get seen; they are limited to 2 appointments, and then they are assigned to a professional. There are not enough psychiatrists and psychologists to meet this need in the public sector. So our hospitals become the emergency provider of these services.)
Failed to build schools to keep up with demand.
Funding Charter Schools (originally limited to 15 schools to trial innovative programming that could be moved into public schools in 1992, to unlimited in 2021 now up to 37. Including building and modernizing with public dollars.
Private Schools are now eligible for 70% funding of public schools, which includes all the grants Public schools are eligible for.
2025 Weighted Average - looks at 2 years of data, last year’s actual enrollment, and projected enrollment for this year. (Unfunded students in jurisdictions where enrollment exceeds projections) EPSB 2025 over 1000.
Infrastructure takes over school ownership, so the province can take them away from a jurisdiction and hand them over to vendors of their choice.’
Refusal to negotiate with teachers: Largest public worker strike in Alberta. Students standing up with teachers as teachers attempt to have classroom complexity included in their new contract. The province indicates it will use the notwithstanding clause to force teachers back to work.
ABResistance: gives Albertans a chance to use Bill 54 to recall MLAs who are not working in the best interest of their constituents. Go to ABResistance.ca to find out how you can help. Together, we can change the direction this province is headed.
Agreed with everything you said. It's time to stand up before there is no one left to stand up!
Look up neoliberalism and Libertarianism and you will find our Canadian Conservatives want to privatize education, health care and eliminate unions. Hence the UCP eliminating class sizes to make public school a mess and encourage more parents to use private and charter schools. The next step from The Smith government will be education vouchers which are being promoted in tge USA in Republican states. Their purpose is to destroy public education and privatize it. Likely sell off our universities as well. Smith continues to say she listens to Albertans yet does exactly the opposite in education, health care, RCMP pension plan, coal mining in the Rockies. All these issues the large majority of Albertans don't want. But rural Albertans are rock solid UCP even though the UCP is destroying their communities. The NDP is not socialist as I have never met a rural Albertan who can define socialism.
Is our public ed , public health, OAS, daycare, dental and pharmacare socialist? Because the UCP and Poilievre plan to eliminate them all! Source: 2025 book by Martin Lukacs called The Poilievre Project.