By Sheldon Spackman

will have a financial impact

Student enrolment lower than anticipated at Wild Rose School Division

Oct 6, 2020 | 10:37 AM

Student enrolment in Wild Rose School Division has come in lower than anticipated.

Officials say 4,424 students are enrolled for the 2020-21 school year – 337 less than expected.

That total includes 353 students said to be enrolled in at-home learning.

Superintendent Brad Volkman says central Alberta has been hit hard by the economic downturn and as such, they are seeing many families choosing to leave their local communities or have opted for home schooling because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s one of the choices out there right now that’s available to Albertans,” says Volkman. “We’ve had declining enrolments for the last probably five years-in-a-row, but never 337 all at once. So this is a unique year in that way for sure.”

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Volkman admits this will have an impact on district funding over the next few years.

“The way they’re (Alberta Education) calculating our funding is through a weighted moving average,” he explains. “Our funding is based on a formula each year based on the next year, the present year, and the previous year, so that’s better than basing it all on just your lowest year. But none-the-less, it’s in a downward trend.”

Although this year’s provincial funding is already set, Volkman notes they’ll have to prepare for lower funding next year.

“We will hold back some of the spending we would have normally done for this year because it still gets corrected in the year after,” he points out. “I would have expected maybe 100 less (students) due to the economy, but I wouldn’t have expected this many though.”

Regardless, Volkman says things are working well in the new school year so far, both in terms of the classrooms and for the at-home learning program.

“You can tell they’re (students) happy to be back at school,” adds Volkman. “Being away from school and friends for six months, they were ready to come back. It’s fun for them to be with their peers and all that and I feel like they’re making adjustments to the guidelines and new safety rules that we have in place.”

Volkman describes the circumstances surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic as a challenging balancing act.

“We’re trying to make sure that our schools run as normally as possible,” remarks Volkman. “But if we don’t take seriously some of the many things we’ve been encouraged to do like self-screening every day and stay home when you’re sick, I just want to encourage parents that maybe one of the reasons things are going well right now, and that we don’t have any confirmed cases in any of our schools or connected to our schools, is because our parents are taking that seriously.”

Volkman adds that he’s very proud of his teachers and staff for working hard to ensure both classroom and at-home learning is safe.

“I’ve never seen this level of workload for our principals and our teachers,” he admits. “They’re doing more cleaning stuff and more changing the way they do things in their classrooms than ever before, just to make this work. So we’re very proud of them.”