Frontier Centre

New school trustees were elected in Alberta recently, and several of them have identified class size as a major public concern. But they and their colleagues in Manitoba and Saskatchewan should be looking at the larger picture. If school boards would focus on how to direct funds appropriately, the issue of class size would take care of itself. All across the region, resources are flowing into schools that are now half-empty. If funding followed each student directly, higher enrolments would automatically mean larger budgets, and lower enrolments would mean lower budgets. Classrooms with 40 kids or more would not exist if schools had a budget directly tied to the number of students. Such a funding model would also mean that parents could send their children to any type of school they wish without having to pay extra for the best possible education. Right now, some parents are paying private school fees as well as property taxes to support public schools that their kids don’t attend. Rethinking t