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By Alessia Proietti

NDP shares education plans

UCP claims NDP wants to defund choice in education

May 25, 2023 | 4:51 PM

The UCP claims that the NDP wants to defund choice in education, particularly in the Catholic sector.

In a tweet on May 18, Adriana LaGrange, UCP candidate for Red Deer-North and current Minister of Education, posted an open letter written to parents of children in the Catholic school system.

LaGrange was a school board trustee with the Red Deer Regional Catholic School Division before becoming MLA.

UCP members state in the letter that out of the roughly 740,000 students in the province, one quarter attend Catholic school and 94 per cent of overall education funding goes towards the public school system.

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The UCP says they enshrined the Choice in Education Act in 2020 for parents and claim the NDP was strongly opposed to the decision.

The letter refers to a tweet that NDP Red Deer-North candidate Jaelene Tweedle shared in 2022 that she would rather fund one education system instead of multiple. She makes a similar comment in 2021.

The UCP says in the letter that Nathan Ip, NDP candidate for Edmonton-South West and an Edmonton public school board trustee, called for the elimination of the catholic school system in 2018. They say that Cathy Hogg, NDP candidate for Cypress-Medicine Hat, former school board trustee and former president of the Public School Boards Association, also made a similar statement in 2019.

“The United Conservatives will continue to support a parent’s right to choose how and where their children are educated. Furthermore, if re-elected, we will continue to ensure equitable funding for all choices,” the UCP writes in the letter.

Questioned about the claim at a press conference held by the NDP on Thursday in Red Deer, Tweedle responded that she and the NDP are strong supporters of the public education system, which includes the public, Catholic and francophone systems.

“We’re fully committed to funding every student in those systems and the only choice that I’ve been seeing lacking for a lot of parents is the choice to have their children attend a school that’s well funded, sufficiently staffed, supported, and with a really good curriculum that prepares our children for the future,” she said.

Sarah Hoffman, NDP candidate for Edmonton-Glenora and Opposition Critic for Education and Deputy Leader, made a similar statement.

“Under the UCP, we have seen gross underfunding over the last four years. School divisions that have seen growth, like the public and Catholic school divisions, right here in Red Deer, have been underfunded. They haven’t kept up with the new students. When their families are choosing public, Catholic and francophone schools, we’ve seen that under the UCP, you can’t trust them to fund and honour that choice. We are thousands of teachers short of where we should be if we just kept up with the ratio of teacher to students that we had under the former government,” she said. Tweedle added the UCP underspent the education budget by $1 billion over the past two years.

Hoffman says during the pandemic, the UCP laid off 20,000 support staff, substitute teachers, school bus drivers and educational assistants after promising they would not do so.

When questioned that the decision was made during the order for children to learn from home, Hoffman responded that students were still expected to complete their studies, requiring necessary aids, and many of those laid off were not rehired.

She says the UCP cut funding in half for the Program Unit Funding (PUF) which helps young children between two and six years old with severe disabilities or delays before they enter Grade 1. Services in the program include speech pathologists, occupational therapists, audiologists, and more. They say the UCP reduced supports for three and four-year-olds and ended the program for those in Kindergarten.

The NDP says they are committing to restore the program funding and increase it by $100 million by setting aside a dedicated funding envelope for it.

They also said they will hire 4,000 more teachers throughout all school systems, 3,000 support staff and invest in the construction and modernizations of 125 schools. They added they would have broad consultations with parents, teachers, students, indigenous partners and subject matter experts about the K-12 curriculum.