ROCKY VIEW— Rocky View Schools has approved a spending plan for nearly $9.3 million the public school district will receive from the federal government this year to cope with increased operating costs as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The plan— Unanimously approved by the Rocky View School Board of Trustees at a meeting Thursday (Oct. 8) allocates $2 million for additional substitute teacher payments required due to an increase in teacher absences. It also puts $1 million toward purchasing additional personal protective equipment, hand sanitizer and other health and safety-related resources.
“We know as a result of teachers having to isolate, quarantine, or when they do their daily-checklist and are not able to say no to everything, that our use of subs has increased already this fall,” Superintendent Greg Luterbach said. “When we project that out, we think we’re going to need … $2 million to go into our centralized sub-fund to help pay for those.”
The plan also sets aside $2.8 million for hiring additional teachers to address class pressures between now and February 2021 and to support online learning offerings.
“Given 3,000 kids shifted, we needed to shift staff— And we did that— But we also needed to put in supports and fill a couple of gaps," Luterbach said. "When we did that matching of students and staff, we had some spots, so at the end of the day, we hired six additional learning leads. We needed two more high school teachers, two more home school teachers and three more Grade 1 to 9 teachers to be able to service the amount of kids once we were done moving all the staff around."
Funds have also been set aside in the plan for the hiring of non-teaching staff, Luterbach said, including a dedicated technical support worker for online learning, a recruiter to support additional hiring and a COVID-19 case manager who will support schools when cases are identified.
“Given the cases we’ve had, the amount of time it’s taken to support schools, walk them through the process, communicate with their families and provide AHS with the required information, [we felt] we needed a dedicated case manager to do that,” Luterbach said.
Nearly $2 million— 20 per cent of Rocky View Schools' federal funding— Is allocated directly to schools, at a rate of $78.77 per student. According to Luterbach, those funds will help each school’s staff determine how best to address school-specific issues.
“Schools have different challenges," he said. "Some schools are looking and [saying] ‘We’re really struggling with supervision at lunchtime.’ Other schools are saying, ‘We’ve got that covered, but we need more masks.’”
Other allocations in the plan include setting aside $900,000 to maintain bus routes that could otherwise be combined due to lower ridership but will be preserved to allow for social distancing protocols on each bus, while $200,000 will be used for Rocky View Schools Education Centre staff and resources to support administrative operations.
For the more than 3,000 Rocky View Schools students who are learning from home this year, Luterbach said the plan supports online learners with $400,000 set aside for additional online curriculum resources, technical support and equipment.
The nearly $9.3 million in funding is part of the federal government’s transfer of $2 billion to provinces and territories in August to support school divisions in their efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19. The Alberta government received roughly $262.8 million from that transfer and is distributing the money to school authorities on a $350-per-student basis.
According to Alberta’s Education Minister, Adriana LaGrange, the federal government will transfer the funds to the provinces and territories in two phases – once in September and once later in the school year.
The $9.3 million is in addition to $2 million Rocky View Schools has already allocated from its reserve fund to support hiring additional custodial staff, Board Chair Fiona Gilbert said, as well as $1.4 million the district used from the 2019-20 operational budget in anticipation of increased health and safety-related expenditures due to the pandemic.
