Supplementary growth funding announced by Alberta Education doesn't fully address the additional instructional costs being faced by Rocky View Schools (RVS).

Even with about $2 million in supplementary funding, RVS says it is receiving $3.3 million less than if every student was fully funded this year.

Rocky View School officials have crunched the numbers and say the one-time grant announced on Nov. 28 will provide $1.2 million in addition to the $737,000 already anticipated by enrolment growth funding.

Base funding is determined by a method called weighted moving average (WMA) that calculates the previous two years of enrolment and funding manual.

"For a growing district like RVS, funding based on the previous two years’ enrolment and projected enrolment for the upcoming year does not keep up with the actual number of new students coming into the division," explains the division in its board highlights from the Dec. 14 meeting of its school board of trustees.

Rocky View Schools student population has exploded to 28,558 this school year, and the base instructional funding was for a student population of 27,835. That means there are about 720 students not included in the division’s base instructional grants.

The school division recently report a $9.4 million deficit for the 2022-23 fiscal year.

When the additional funding was announced, RVS school board chair Fiona Gilbert said the division was grateful to the province for recognizing and providing additional financial support for the surge in enrolment growth and were looking to learning more details about the funding RVS will receive.

She did also address concerns RVS has with the WMA funding model.

"RVS has been advocating strongly for several years that the current weighted moving average funding does not provide adequate support for rapidly growing divisions such as RVS," she said in a written statement. "This September alone we welcomed 990 (3.59 per cent) more students into our schools than the previous year. The surge in enrolment growth over the last number of years has also left RVS in urgent need of new schools, and we anticipate further funding for these projects in Budget 2024."

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