Small class sizes are pricey, but the alternative might cost Alberta more

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There are circles of hell when it comes to parental anxiety about kids going back to school in the age of COVID-19. There’s persuading young children to wear masks, getting teenagers to stay apart, finding reliable WiFi in rural areas and in Indigenous communities, weighing whether to allow visits with grandparents, or to leave the workforce to become a remote-learning instructor to your children.

Smack-dab in the middle of the schooling-pandemic vortex of 2020 is seeing your kid head into an overly crowded classroom.

Classroom size debates are nothing new. Teachers’ unions and provincial governments have been butting heads on the subject for decades. Children need some one-on-one to flourish, while provinces need to watch their budget lines.

What hasn’t been part of the discussion before COVID-19 is the direct consequences for public health and the economy of crowding too many little people or teenagers into a small indoor space.

As a harbinger of what is likely to come across the country, it became clear in Alberta this week that as some families opt to keep their children home for remote learning, class sizes are not necessarily going down. In some or many cases, class sizes are going up as teaching resources are put toward the online learning system.

Most Alberta school boards resumed classes, to some degree, this week – earlier than most other provinces except for Quebec. In Edmonton, public school board chair Trisha Estabrooks said 30 per cent of the board’s students will be learning online but “the reality is that doesn’t decrease the overall class size.”

“We also need to have teachers in place to teach those online cohorts.”

Collapsing classes – where schools free up teachers for online learning by reducing their overall number of classes and reassigning the in-person students to new class structures – is going to be a catchphrase of the fall. Just west of the province’s capital city, the Parkland School Division’s deputy superintendent Mark Francis said the board has been able to hire additional teachers or shift staff from non-teaching roles to avoid collapsing classes, except in a few cases.

“Any collapsing has to be done really carefully, because in addition to the need to teach online, we also can’t put 40 kids in a class,” he said.

Anywhere from 10 per cent to 30 per cent of families seem to be opting for at-home learning, based on early numbers. But that distribution is, of course, not evenly spread among schools or individual grades. Jason Schilling, president of the Alberta Teachers’ Association, said he doesn’t have hard numbers yet, but recent union surveys have some junior and senior high teachers reporting classes with 30 or 40-plus kids. He’s also heard stories from teachers who have smaller classes than last year, and that’s a good thing.

But Mr. Schilling has also heard about schools suddenly losing a teacher to remote learning, and those who remain have to take on larger classes.

“I’ve had teachers contact me and say ’my classes went up by seven,’ or went up by three or four.”

Andre Corbould, Alberta Education’s deputy minister, said the province has heard the concern that assigning teachers to remote learning has led to some growth in class sizes in schools. The United Conservative Party government of Jason Kenney has made no secret that the province is cash-strapped, with a deficit this year of $24.2-billion, more than three times what was forecast. But Mr. Corbould noted this week that the $262-million Alberta has received from Ottawa for a safe school reopening – from more than $2-billion in funds distributed across the country – could “go a long way” to addressing some of the concerns about class sizes.

In Alberta and other provinces, back-to-school rules on wearing masks and physical distancing are, in many regards, confusing, contradictory and ever-changing. In practice, their implementation will sometimes be based on what suits the specific circumstances of the school, or the inclination of the principal or teachers. (On Thursday, Deena Hinshaw took a question from a reporter about a student asked to wear a mask while running in gym class. In her response, Alberta’s Chief Medical Health Officer was her usual circumspect self, but clearly said children don’t have to be masked in gym if they can stay physically distanced from others.)

The variance in adapting to the health rules and proclamations makes class sizes – across the school system – all the more important.

And the issue will become more pronounced as the year progresses and the Canadian winter sets in. In mid-January on the prairies, spending hours outside is possible, but becomes much more challenging.

To be sure, the system is still in flux, and governments, school boards and teachers are grappling with a lot of issues, many unforeseen and unintended. Teachers are still being moved around. Class sizes are still in question. And everyone has the same goal: To get the kids in school and keep them there.

But the fact that remote learning could lead to larger classes in schools could have been planned for weeks ago.

Mr. Kenney has said it would cost billions to significantly decrease Alberta’s class sizes, and his government can’t afford it.

But some degree of rethink feels inevitable. The risk remains of future COVID-19 outbreaks that stem from schools and children being seated together in close confines for hours on end. The economic hit that could come with further COVID-19 shutdowns – potentially reclosing businesses or forcing even more parents out of the workforce – could make governments’ calculations on class sizes penny wise and pound foolish.

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