Opinion: No public money should build private schools in Alberta
On Sept. 17, Alberta’s UCP government announced an “accelerated capital plan” that purportedly fast-tracks new school builds, modular classrooms, modernizations, and streamlines the clunky infrastructure approval process. Alberta’s education system has needed infrastructure attention for decades. The dire need has been exacerbated through chronic funding cuts, compounded by year-over-year enrolment growth. At face value, this (albeit one-time) boost is certainly necessary for the public education system. However, alarmingly, the capital plan also rams through an egregious plan to fund private school construction. This huge policy shift makes Alberta the first and only province to build private schools with public funding. Furthermore, the plan also intends to create 12,500 new charter student spaces by 2027-28. This rapid privatization will only exacerbate the public education crisis by diverting much-needed public resources to private entities. Giving private projects “equal footing” in both funding and queue positioning under the cover of solving the space crisis only does more harm to the strained public system. Privatization schemes take resources from the system that serves the most students to top up exclusive institutions. Every four years, more than $1 billion of public money already flows out of public education to private and charter schools. Alberta already publicly funds accredited private schools with one of the highest operational rates in the country at 70 per cent.