Education funding cuts hit homeschooling hard

Andrea Roberts
Times Reporter

 

On April 15, past Premier Jim Prentice announced his plan to help improve Alberta’s budget, by freezing funds to the public sector, which happens to include education.
One of the segments of education that will be the worst affected, if the freezing continues under the new government, will be homeschooling.
When a parent decides to homeschool their child, they must sign up to be part of a school board, who helps to fund their children’s curriculum and provides yearly visits from a government facilitator.
Physical schools, as well as larger school boards, will have a larger cash reserve to use during the freeze, while smaller boards will have smaller reserves. This means that they maybe unable to fund new students for the upcoming school year. Parents will then have to pay for their child’s education out of their own pocket.
According to Carmen Kublik, a parent who homeschools her children, there are many problems with the freezes, such as the fact that boards would save money in accounts for students and if it wasn’t used, it would be saved. Some parents would save this for further education endeavors, such as saving for microscopes for the science program.
“Because of the freeze, they are also doing a clawback, so that means that the money that the families have been saving for wiser education purposes have been taken from them and I find this rather unfortunate,” says Kublik.
According to the Alberta Home Education Association (AHEA), and many homeschooling parents agree, this cut is a knee-jerk reaction to the economy crisis in the province. AHEA says this type of education is one of the most economically friendly. According to Kublik, homeschooling boards are given about $1,600 for each student and half of that goes to the parents for the education, while they are given about $10,000 per physically schooled student.
This means, according to the AHEA, the 10,000 homeschooled students, which make up about two per cent of Albertan students, have saved the province $80 million in the last year.
However, despite the parents and AHEA’s fears, Education Alberta says that they don’t anticipate a significant effect on homeschooling. In an email from Education Alberta, they explained that the education funding will have an increase in 2015 funding and the grant rate for base instruction home education for public school jurisdictions will increase from $1,641.27 to $1,664.88 in the 2015/2016 school year.
“While, through Budget 2015, there will be some grant rate reductions in differential funding, we don’t anticipate a significant effect on home education students,” said Jill Wheeler-Bryks, Assistant Director of Communications for Alberta Education.
Despite this reassurance the AHEA say that the situation has not been fully explained to them or the parents. They say Alberta Education keeps giving them conflicting answers and an instruction on how to proceed and all they want is some information.
“I have asked many different people and we are not getting no (real) info but more misleading and confusing info, so we are not sure what to trust,” said Paul van den Bosch, president of the AHEA.