The Chinook’s Edge Board approved the allocation of $1.1 million in provincial funding during last week’s meeting.
The money was Chinook’s Edge School Division’s share of $125 million which was distributed by Alberta’s government to school divisions in July in order to address enrollment pressures.
CESD Superintendent Kurt Sacher notes that $600,000 dollars was used to address specific pressure points in their schools. He says “they were very appreciative of additional dollars. Our top priority was to take care of what we call our R.O.G. (rate of growth) watch list. So those schools that were dealing with challenging class sizes. We had a number, for example, with higher Kindergarten numbers than we wanted to see. So of that $1.1 million, just over half of it was spent adding additional teaching time to address hot spots in the school division through our priority watch list.”
Sacher notes about $140,000 dollars was put aside to support release time for CESD’s Kindergarten to Grade 3 teachers so they can complete testing that Alberta Education asked divisions to undertake for the first time. He explains what else they were able to purchase with the provincial funding. Sacher says “we spent about $350,000 dollars for chromebooks to help us as we move away from having cell phones in schools so that they still have a device to learn from, that is not a cell phone, and also it sets us up down the road with software expectations as provincial achievement tests and diplomas move completely online and we used a little bit of the money just in our safety department.”
Meantime, the Alberta Government announced this week that it is set to spend $8.6 billion dollars over the next three years on building schools to help battle current and potentially future capacity issues across schools in the province.
He mentions that they are taking it as a great opportunity to really advocate for their top priorities that they’ve requested from government. He says “so for example in Sylvan Lake, we’ve already got our high school there at 107 per cent capacity, bursting at the seams. We’re in the process of advocating with our partners at Red Deer Catholic and the Town of Sylvan Lake, and couple of post-secondary institutions to just see if we can’t get a new high school in Sylvan Lake through this.”
He adds, their next priorities beyond Sylvan Lake are Innisfail High School modernization and a new elementary school in Olds.
Sacher hopes some of the provincial dollars will make their way to support Chinook’s Edge and he is really excited about the possibility.