The NDP opposition has launched a survey looking at challenges that parents, teachers and students face in their local classrooms.
Education Critic Rakhi Pancholi says they want to get a picture about what’s happened in Alberta schools after some education cuts that have happened under the UCP government.
“Across the province, we’ve seen a huge increase in not only the number of students, we have thousands of more Alberta students in our school system than we did in 2019, but we also have much complex classrooms. We know that the impact of the pandemic, learning loss, mental health challenges, we’ve seen kids need more supports in their classrooms.”
Public reporting of class sizes had happened in Alberta for decades before being discontinued by the government in 2019.
Pancholi says they also looking to get information around supports that available in the classrooms.
“Especially in communities like in the Peace Country, it’s challenging to get some of those professionals like speech language pathologists or occupational therapists or mental health support workers actually in the schools. It’s hard to get those resources to those communities period. We need to see that there is a strategy and a plan to make sure that there’s ways to access those supports no matter where a student is.”
Pancholi says the survey will also ask about school fees since some divisions had to raise them because of funding cuts.
A link to the survey can be found here.
Our full interview with Pancholi can be heard below.
– Kyle Moore, Trending 55 Newsroom
