The Rocky View Schools (RVS) board of trustees reconvened for its first meeting of the new school year after the summer holidays on Sept. 7.
The first order of business was, as always, a discussion on enrolment numbers. Since the last school year, RVS admin staff reported, enrolment numbers have increased by roughly 1,000 students. It's about the same skyrocketing enrolment rate the public school division has charted over the last several years.
Superintendent Greg Luterbach said the official numbers will be sent to the Alberta government at the end of the month. He added the enrolment numbers will have a direct impact on funding.
“Certainly, September 30 is an important day; it’s the date of which we send enrolments up to the province of Alberta,” he said. “When we talk about how big a school division is, its typically your September 30 number.”
Looking back to the end of September 2022, the school division saw 27,612 enrolled students. According to Luterbach, this was an increase of roughly 950 students from the year prior. At the end of the 2023 school year, RVS had increased enrolment at just over 28,000 students.
In January of each year, the school board is required by the Alberta Government to provide an estimate for how many students it thinks will be enroled in the upcoming school year. After looking at several different factors, said Luterbach, the projected numbers of enrolment for the upcoming school year is 28,680, a roughly 3.8 per cent increase from the 2022/23 school year.
“You look at factors like community growth through housing starts, you look at what’s the traditional grade to grade growth, you look at those historical trends, and you have to decide how do you look at those trends in light of when COVID was in the middle of your typical sample years,” he said. “We look at things like census and birth rate data that we can get.”
Luterbach said the overall population growth is driving increased enrolment numbers. He added many communities that fall under RVS boundaries are growing at a rapid pace.
With the increase enrolment numbers, 2200 students represent each grade level on average. Luterbach said fluctuations in numbers will continue to occur.
“Sometimes it feels like we grow all these thousand new students over the summer," he stated. "The reality is they’re trickling in all throughout the school year. Some arrive for the first day of school probably today, somebody left today at the same time because they moved away.”
Trustee Shali Baziuk asked for confirmation that the 2023 projected numbers went into Alberta Education's weighted-moving-average (WMA) funding formula.
The WMA generally decides funding based on a three-year average instead of taking into account projected or actual enrolment numbers in the current school year. This often leaves growing school divisions like RVS short on base per student funding from the province by a substantial margin in any given year.
Luterbach said there are “funding formula nuisances in that.”
“For example, if First Nations are being funded by the federal government, those have to be removed from this list because provincial governments not funding them,” Luterbach said. “For the weighted-moving-average, it uses a slightly different version of the number.”
