Five years after challenging government-imposed restrictions on class sizes, the Flin Flon School Division will get to decide how many students populate its classrooms.
The provincial government has cancelled a planned early-years class-size cap, Flin Flon Superintendent of Schools Constance McLeese told trustees at their Tuesday, March 14 meeting.
The cap would have required divisions to limit most kindergarten to grade 3 classrooms to 20 students. It was set to take effect in September, though Flin Flon and other divisions have worked to voluntarily comply with the cap since 2012.
The province has provided special funding to help divisions meet the cap. McLeese said this funding will be available in 2017-18, but there’s no assurance it will continue beyond that.
McLeese said the division will comply with the non-mandatory cap in 2017-18, as budgetting and staffing for the upcoming year has already been completed.
Decisions on class sizes beyond next year will revolve around the availability of funding, she said.
McLeese said “a fair body of evidence” suggests smaller class sizes yield student success, but she added the provincial education department looked at different data in deciding to lift the cap.
“So obviously there’s different bodies of data that people are looking at,” she said. “What that means? I mean, I’d have to see what they’re looking at, what they’re basing that on.”
McLeese added the division has done a good job overall in maintaining smaller class sizes, which she believes relates to Flin Flon students’ strong literacy and numeracy scores.
The Manitoba Teachers’ Society condemned the province’s cancellation of the cap, with president Norm Gould saying it “ignores overwhelming evidence” and “plays with the future of every child at those grade levels.”
In a news release, Education Minister Ian Wishart said the cap was arbitrary and there was no process in place to evaluate success or failure of the measure.
Data from grades 3 and 4 provincial assessments in reading and numeracy demonstrated no significant improvement in student achievement due to smaller classes, he added.
When the then-NDP government announced the cap in 2012, the Flin Flon school board of the day wrote to the province to express its apprehension.
Trustees’ concerns included insufficient funding to hire additional teachers, conflicting evidence on the merits of smaller classes, and a reduced capacity to accommodate parents who request their children attend École McIsaac School instead of Ruth Betts Community School.
Across the border, the Saskatchewan government reviewed the issue of class sizes in 2013 and chose not to impose limits.
“You know the responsibility for distributing resources in school divisions rests with school divisions,” then-education minister Russ Marchuk told the Canadian Press at the time.
“Of course there’s going to be situations where numbers of students in classrooms is greater than what you’d like to see, but for the most part I really believe that school divisions do a very good job of distributing resources.”
The Flin Flon Teachers’ Association, the union that represents Flin Flon teachers, had no comment on the Manitoba government’s decision.
