Foothills School Division growth strains two Okotoks schools

The Foothills School Division will be welcoming a few more staff and students into the classroom this school year. 

Superintendent Chris Fuzessy said enrolment is up slightly compared to last year, and most of the growth is at Foothills Composite High School and Meadow Ridge School in Okotoks. 

“Most of the new construction in Okotoks right now is in the catchment area for those two schools,” Fuzessy said. 

Final enrolment numbers are tallied after the school year starts, but overall, the division has been growing by 100 to 200 students per year, he said. 

He estimates Foothills Composite is at 125 to 130 per cent capacity while Meadow Ridge, a K-9 school in north Okotoks, is at 85 to 90 per cent capacity. 

Despite being under 100 per cent capacity, Meadow Ridge recently added two new classrooms and will have a portable classroom on site later in the school year. 

“We are doing what we can to mitigate the enrolment increase and create classroom spaces so that all students have a homeroom base,” Fuzessy said. 

Total square footage is used to calculate capacity so that includes the NBA-size gymnasium at Meadow Ridge.

“It's a bit of a wrinkle in the way that capacity is calculated,” he said, adding the division is advocating to have the Province change how it calculates capacity to reflect the true use of the school.

“The 85 per cent doesn’t necessarily reflect how busy that building is on a daily basis," he said. 

When it comes to increasing enrolment, the school division doesn’t see the same increase in funding to hire staff that it would have in the past. The current formula determines funding on a weighted moving average as opposed to per-capita funding, he said. 

“That, more or less, ends up giving us perhaps half of what we used to receive in the past,” Fuzessy said.

Despite challenges, he said the division tries to keep up with staffing increases. 

“We are trying to reinvest after a period of what I would say would be steady decline in the amount of staffing we could build into the budget,” he said. “So that is a positive.” 

Forty-five full-time positions have been put back into the system for this school year, including teachers and support staff. 

Several of those staff members will support a programming expansion at Cameron Crossing School, which Fuzessy said is the major programming change in the division this year. 

“It really is to help students refocus, repackage and perhaps move back into their community school,” he said. 

With province-wide challenges finding bus drivers, Foothills is fortunate to have enough drivers to cover all bus routes, he said.

“We're sitting in a pretty good position compared to some of the other divisions that we talked with, in terms of having enough drivers."

The school year starts with staggered entry on Aug. 31 and Sept. 1, with a full start on Sept. 5.