Earlier this week, the Government of Alberta announced that it plans to $215 in new funding for schools this year.
Of that, $125 million will be directed to operations and $90 million will go toward what the government calls “modular classrooms”, or what we know as “portables”.
And certainly $125 million sounds like a lot to spend on education operations. It’s important that we have context for that number.\
For example, when the provincial government released their 2024–2025 budget earlier this year, they budgeted $9.762 billion for education. This new spending is only a 1.28% increase to that original forecast.
The government’s media release claimed that this new funding was to address increased enrollment due to a “booming” population:
Alberta’s population is booming and causing unprecedented growth in our education system, adding a historic number of new students across the province for the 2024-25 school year. Alberta’s government recognizes and sympathizes with the challenges school authorities face with increasing enrolment, rising operational costs and inflation. That is why it is investing $215 million to help alleviate these pressures, beginning in the 2024-25 school year.
Here’s the thing though. Alberta’s population grew from 4,800,768 people at the end of 2023 to 4,849,906 after just the first quarter of 2024. That’s an increase of just 1.02%. And we still have nearly two full quarters of population growth to go before school starts in September.
(Well, one of those quarters has already passed, but the data hasn’t been released yet.)
That means it’s unlikely this new funding will be adequate for dealing with growth in enrollment.
Let’s go back a bit further to show you that this situation is even worse than it seems.
As of this past February, the Alberta government was forecasting a final spend of $9.350 billion on education operations during the 2023–2024 budget year. If we include the new spending announcement, the government will be spending $538 million more than they did last year, which works out to be a 5.74% increase.
Alberta’s population between the beginning of the 2023–2024 budget year and when the current budget year began grew from 4,645,229 4,849,906, a 4.4% increase.
Now, a 5.74% increase sure does seem it would cover a 4.4% increase in population growth, right? But there’s one more calculation we need to consider.
At the beginning of April 2023, which is when the 2023–2024 budget year began, Alberta’s consumer price index sat at 163.7. By April 2024, it had increased by 3.0% to 168.6.
When we combine a 3.0% increase in inflation with a 4.4% increase in population growth over the last year, we end up with a 7.4% increase in aggregate demand on increased education funding.
And yet, the Alberta government is increasing it by 5.74%, including this new funding. That’s a shortfall.
It gets worse though.
During the 2018–2019 budget year, the last one under the NDP administration, education funding ended up being $8.223 billion. The new funding on top of what has already been budgeted for 2024–2025 means that the UCP government will have increased education operational spending by 20.24% during the 6 years they will have been in power by the end of March 2025.
During their first 5 years in power, the UCP government has seen the province’s population grow from 4,337,569 to 4,849,906. That’s over half a million people! It’s also 11.81%.
Over the same period, the consumer price index rose from 143.7 to 168.6, an increase of 17.33%.
And when we combine 11.81% and 17.33%, we end up with an aggregate demand on increased funding of 29.14%.
The UCP has underfunded the K–12 education system by nearly 10 percentage points. Had we kept up with population growth and inflation since 2019, we’d be spending at least $10.619 billion this year, not $9.762 billion.
Adding on $125 million in new funding seems like peanuts when we’re dealing with a budget shortfall of nearly $1 billion.
And that’s not even considering the shortfall in capital spending. The fact that we’re spending nearly $100 million just so we can have 100 additional classrooms in portable should be proof enough that this government has not been keeping up with the demand for more classroom spaces.
Oh, one more thing. Keep in mind that the inflation and population numbers are only up to the end of the first quarter of 2024, but the budget year goes to the end of the first quarter of 2025. So, the demand on education operational spending will likely be higher than what I calculated as inflation and population continues to grow.
