The Peace Wapiti School District in Northern Alberta is looking into closing the Valhalla Elementary School (3rd point, pg 2), citing it faces financial penalization from the government for operating a school with critical enrolment that has not been granted “Small School by Necessity Status”.
Briefly, a school can be granted this status if it is:
a) An unacceptably long bus-ride away from neighbouring schools. Or,Without getting into all the grinding details, the PWSD is examining the option of bussing most of the Valhalla children to Hythe, Alberta, which is currently undergoing an extremely expensive renovation and re-build that, once completed, will be too small to house its current students. (Scroll down, 5th from bottom) How small is too small you ask? The finished building will be considered full with 510 students and there's currently 526 students to fit in there right now without the extra school's kids.
b) All the neighbouring schools are full.
16 extra kids is an entire classroom. Regardless, the neighbouring town's children are slated to be hauled into this overcrowded school should Valhalla Elementary’s doors, in fact, close for the final time. The question is, why? Geographically, Hythe just squeaks under the limit of bussing distance but when it comes to a body count, there is no room at the inn. It should be a no brainer that Valhalla Elementary is a Small School by Necessity since there’s nowhere for the children to go. The answer?
The ‘FTE funded enrollment’ used in Allocation Criteria #1 (Total Base Allocation) and Allocation Criteria #2 (Total Variable Allocation) is determined by counting the number of funded students that is equal to the funded student head count, plus the number of funded children as 0.5 full-time equivalent (FTE). (AB Gov't Funding Manual)Emphasis appropriately placed by Alberta Ed on the word “funded students”.
Hythe Elementary busses in upwards of 120 students from the nearby Horse Lake First Nations and because their funding comes from the federal government, Alberta Ed doesn’t even acknowledge their existence when calculating provincial funding & utilization rates for their schools. They used to, but they don’t any more.
At first glance this just appears as a technicality -- after all, funding from Ottawa is still funding.
EXCEPT: The eventuality with this new "Indian free formula" is any FN students who bus off-reserve to attend school in Alberta are going to find themselves sharing desks with their classmates because school administrators are going to be anxious to avoid penalization for their so-called “empty” school.
That’s not good news for anybody.
Post Source: Alice the Camel
