Province rolls out complexity teams for Alberta schools

The province announced funding for a new plan to help alleviate strain on its most complex classrooms. Critics say there are glaring oversights.

The Alberta government has announced a new level of supports to assist teachers and classrooms that are facing pressure in a variety of different ways.

On Thursday, Premier Danielle Smith and Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides said 476 complexity teams will be set up to assist in schools where needed.

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These units, consisting of one teacher and two education assistants, will be tasked with supporting diverse needs of students.

The provincial government says these teams will be paid for through an investment of $143 million from the current budget.

“Every child deserves a safe, supportive classroom where they can learn, and every teachers deserves the backing they need to do their job well,” said Smith in a news release Thursday.

The teams will aim to identify student needs early, support learners with diverse challenges and provide in-class support to teachers. They will also have the ability to “bring in additional specialists when needed.”

Those supports include occupational therapists, speech language pathologists and psychologists.

Officials say specialized testing can also be ordered by the complexity teams.

“Establishing complexity teams will help teachers manage increasingly diverse classroom and, most importantly, make sure that more students are able to receive individual attention,” said Nicolaides.

These teams will be distributed among schools that have been identified as highest priority for “complexity factors” as well as others that possess “unique complexity challenges” that require different strategies for supports.

To figure this out, the province said it examined three different measures to determine classroom complexity: composition, occurrence rate and class size.

“To determine the highest overall priority, the ratings for each measure were combined to determine an overall complexity rating or priority band,” officials said.

Priority classes rated high on all three measures or high on two of the three measures.

Officials say any of the measures on their own, such as class size, is “not the best predictor of classroom pressures.”

According to the government’s findings, 4,486 classrooms in 655 schools are high priority.

The breakdown of teams per school board is as follows:

Metro School Board Complexity Team Allocation

Urban and Rural School Boards Complexity Team Allocation

The introduction of the complexity teams is only the next phase of the work by Alberta’s Class Size and Complexity Cabinet Committee.

Reaction

The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) Trustees say they ‘appreciate’ the announcement.

“This additional funding is a positive step forward to addressing the realities we see in our classrooms every day. CBE will move quickly to allocate funding and resources, but additional hiring and onboarding of new employees at this point in the school year may take some time,” the statement reads.

The school boards oversee hiring the over 1,400 staff.

The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) also worries about the hiring process considering shortages have been an ongoing issue.

“Talking to principals who say they have had applications to get new teachers at their school that have been going unfilled. They’re not getting the resumes. This is part of the problem of this government. They have disrespected teachers and public education for so long that people are struggling to work in the system,” said ATA president, Jason Schilling.

Schilling also raises concerns about the lack of help for grade seven to twelve students.

However, the province says research indicates that addressing student needs during the formative K to grade six years is more effective and less costly than attempting to remediate behavioural or academic gaps in junior and senior high.