Considerable time at a recent, lengthy Rocky View Schools (RVS) Board of Trustees meeting was devoted to an issue that seems to plague the local public school division every year – its available space.
On March 24, the school board unveiled its three-year capital plan for 2023 to 2026, highlighting the need for new school builds in Airdrie, Chestermere, and Cochrane – the three municipalities that host the majority of schools within the RVS division. As trustees and staff noted, these three municipalities are each among Alberta's fastest-growing communities, and would benefit from the addition of a new school virtually every year.
An RVS press release pointed out that RVS's student population grows by anywhere from 750 to 1,000 new students annually. According to RVS, the school division's utilization rate is expected to be at 101 per cent by 2026.
Of course, receiving funding for three new schools a year is a pipe dream – even for what is technically Alberta's fifth-largest school division. RVS isn't the only school division fighting for new builds in Alberta, and there's never enough money going around for everyone.
The band-aid solution to these problems is the use of modular classrooms, but even that has become a considerable headache for RVS. As another discussion at the March 24 meeting revealed, the division's requests for more modulars from Alberta Education have been ignored.
With no new modulars on the horizon, trustees and staff have had to be creative when determining how to shuffle and relocate RVS' modulars. Success in that regard is a double-edged sword, however, as it sends the Alberta government the message that RVS is fully capable of handling its space and capacity issues on its own.
It's a tough situation with only one viable long-term solution – more funding. In a province where the government is once again capable of posting budget surpluses, using those added funds to provide public education a boost in the coming years has to be a priority.
