LAKELAND - The number of students attending schools across the Northern Lights Public Schools (NLPS) division has returned to near pre-pandemic levels.
An increase in enrolment was one of the topics on the agenda at the most recent NLPS board meeting, which took place in Bonnyville on Wednesday, Oct. 25.
According to the most recent confirmed enrolment numbers, the division has 5,849 students from Kindergarten to Grade 12 in schools across the Lakeland.
The tally doesn’t include preschool students.
NLPS Superintendent Rick Cusson says that when it comes to funding, the division’s Kindergarten students are considered part-time as the provincial government only funds a half-day kindergarten program.
“We do offer full-day programming for our Kindergarten students and most of them attend full-time, but we only receive funding for a half-time program,” he explained.
With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, the Alberta Ministry of Education shut down all schools across the province. At the time, NLPS had an enrolment of 5,982.
That number dropped to 5,624 for the 2020-2021 school year, when some students either shifted to online learning with NLPS or altered their learning environment in other ways.
The following two school years saw enrolments of 5,633 and 5,766 respectively.
According to Cusson, provincially, there were about 40,000 students unaccounted for during the two years of the pandemic, which caused an overall decrease in enrolment across Alberta.
Learning Together
During the pandemic, NLPS offered families the option to do online learning, and created the Learning Together Anywhere program, which later became the Learning Together Anywhere School.
“At one point, we had close to 200 students enroled in that program,” Cusson stated. “We also offered families the option to enrol in homeschooling connected to NLPS schools and some families also took advantage of that as well.”
Reasons for declining numbers during the pandemic included some students transferring to other schools, starting homeschooling programs not connected to NLPS, or relocating to other provinces. Others simply didn’t inform the school division where they went during that time.
There are also changes in enrolment between this year and last year. Schools in Cold Like saw an overall increase in enrolment during that time while most of the other communities within the division experienced a decline or stayed relatively the same.
“Schools in Cold Lake experienced the largest fluctuations in enrolment,” Cusson said. “Most of this is related to configuration changes that NLPS made to those schools to address capacity issues at schools in that community.”
Numbers have also increased in the five outreach schools operated by NLPS – Cold Lake Outreach, Bonnyville Outreach, Lac La Biche Outreach, Crossroads Outreach on Buffalo Lake Metis Settlement, and Journeys Learning Academy on the Kikino Metis Settlement.
Urban to rural
Looking at long-term trends, Cusson said when NLPS experiences enrolment growth, it also occurs in urban areas first followed by growth two to three years later in the division’s smaller, rural schools.
“The same thing happens when we see decreases in enrolment. We see decreases in our more urban schools first followed by a drop at our rural schools 2-3 years later,” he said.
Regarding how this increased enrolment will impact funding, Cusson explained that provincial government funding is largely based on what is referred to as the weighted moving average (WMA).
The WMA provides funding based 50 per cent on what the division projects its enrolment will be for the year (projections are made in December and approved in March), 30 per cent on what the division’s actual enrolments were for the previous year and 20 per cent on what the division’s actual enrolments were two years previous.
The projections and the increased student count means a stable budget forecast for Northern Lights.
“Since we had projected an increase in enrolment and came close to our projections, we won’t need to make any adjustments to our budget due to our enrolments,” he stated. “If there had been an increase in enrolment over and above what was projected, we may have had to review staffing depending on where the enrolment growth was occurring. However, it can be challenging to increase staffing when there is no corresponding increase to provincial funding.”
