Premier Danielle Smith has launched an ambitious school construction plan to help relieve pressure created by a population boom by creating 50,000 spaces for students over the next three years.
The School Construction Accelerator Program, announced by Smith in a provincewide televised address Tuesday evening, will cost $8.6 billion over three years. It adds $6.5 billion to the previously announced amount of $2.1 billion.
Smith said the plan aims to create an additional 150,000 student spaces in the four years after the initial three-year push, for a total of 200,000 over seven years.
“This is quite literally the fastest and largest build our province can manage given available construction workforce capacity and the time it takes to permit, prepare and service available school sites,” Smith said.
Smith said cabinet just approved funding for schools in Calgary, Edmonton, Barrhead, Breton Mallaig, Redcliff, Taber and Wainwright. She did not offer details about how many schools will be built and whether they will be built under public-private partnerships.
She also didn’t say how Alberta plans to recruit additional teachers. The address was prerecorded and Smith was travelling back from a government trip to the United States on Tuesday.
Many Alberta schools, particularly in Edmonton and Calgary, are at or are over-capacity. Smith said more than 200,000 people moved to the province in 2023.
Smith said the system is adding 33,000 students, or the equivalent of 35 new schools, each year.
Smith said people are coming to the province because of jobs and low taxes. But she blamed the federal Liberal government for upsetting the delicate balance with its “unrestrained open border policies.”
In a memo released last week, the advocacy committee of the Edmonton Public Schools board said the district is growing by about 5,000 students a year, enough to fill two new high schools.
Watch| Alberta premier announces School Construction Accelerator Program:
Alberta Premier Danielle Smith says her government will dramatically increase spending on building new schools — both public and private. In a televised address Tuesday evening, Smith promised to increase the budget for new schools to $8.6 billion during the next three years. She’ll also offer a new incentive program to help private schools build more spaces for students. As Janet French explains, population growth has put schools under pressure.
The division will be out of high school capacity by 2027, the memo adds, yet the province granted construction funding for one K-9 school in the 2022-23 school year. Edmonton Public Schools is the second-largest division in Alberta.
The accelerator fund will also allow the province to buy specialized modular classrooms to house 20,000 new students while the new schools are built, Smith says.
Smith’s plan will also add another 12,500 spaces in charter schools over the next four years. There are currently about 12,000 Alberta students in charter schools and the plan would create space for double that number.
The government is developing a school capital pilot program for non-profit private schools. Smith said this would “incentivize investment in the creation of thousands of new independent school student spaces at a reduced per-student cost to taxpayers.”
Smith wants school boards and municipalities to work together to get these projects started as soon as possible. She asked municipalities to make new schools a “top priority.”
“Cut the red tape,” she said. “Permit and service the sites to our public, Catholic, charter and private schools. We must all lend ourselves to this effort together.”
Premier should’ve seen enrolment surge coming: Nenshi
Speaking to reporters in Calgary, NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi said the government is making a generational investment in schools, but only in reaction to a crisis they should have seen coming.
“The premier can act surprised as much as she wants,” he said. “We all knew this was happening. Teachers knew. Parents knew. Students knew. Anyone who was paying attention knew that this is what was happening in our schools.”
Nenshi said announcing and building these projects on a ramped-up timeline will increase the cost of construction, due to inflation, and suck up the resources of builders who also need to construct affordable housing.
He said Smith appears to have no plan to recruit the teachers needed to staff the new schools. He also criticized the government for planning to direct public money toward private schools.
Dennis MacNeil, president of the Public School Boards Association of Alberta, and a trustee with Aspen View Public Schools, said he was happy with the scale of the announcement, but like Nenshi, is dismayed the government is allocating some of the money away from the public school system.
He said the first school in each community should be a public school because they accept all students.
“This government has an infatuation with both charter schools and with private schools,” MacNeil said.
“What we’re on the road to if we’re not careful is that the public school system will become the catch-all and the sort of second-class citizens in education.”
Smith was not available to take questions about the plan after her address. She will appear at a news conference in Calgary Wednesday morning along with Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides, Infrastructure Minister Pete Guthrie and the chairs of the Calgary Board of Education and Edmonton Public Schools.
