Public school enrolment feels pandemic pinch

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This article was published 23/04/2022 (1429 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Thousands of students who left Manitoba’s public school system early in the COVID-19 pandemic have yet to return, while private schools have recorded an uptick in enrolment in 2021-22, new data show.

Earlier this month, Manitoba Education published its latest K-12 report on fluctuations in registration across 37 public school divisions, funded and non-funded independent schools, and homeschools.

Public school educators counted upwards of 190,000 heads on Sept. 30, 2019. One year later, following the widespread return of learners who had been abruptly dismissed from classes six months earlier due to COVID-19, that figure had dropped five per cent.

Enrolment has since increased slightly, but numbers remain more than three per cent below pre-pandemic levels — the equivalent of roughly 6,000 children and youth. Before the pandemic, it had been trending upwards via incremental incline every year except one over the last decade.

“Whenever one child leaves the public school system, I worry about the future of that child,” said John Wiens, a retired public school leader who is a dean emeritus at the University of Manitoba’s faculty of education.

“There’s virtually no oversight for homeschooling or non-funded private schools.”

The career educator predicts most families who were accessing public school in 2019-20 will eventually return, but children will be shortchanged if that rebound continues to be slow.

Operating funding corresponds to annual enrolment and while students are welcome to join or rejoin the system whenever they wish to do so, public schools may not have adequate resources in place to accommodate them because of budget constraints, he noted.

In response to COVID-19 concerns, some families put their children in small private schools or turned living rooms into classrooms. Other parents decided to forgo optional nursery and kindergarten programming.

Changes have been prompted by everything from worries about the number of close contacts children have in public schools to critiques that mask mandates are an example of government overreach.

Garden Valley School Division, located in Winkler (a southeastern community in which members of the public had flouted public health rules), had enrolment decrease by 10 per cent in 2020. It dropped again, by an additional 11 per cent, in September.

Manitoba’s largest school division has also recorded a significant drop. There are approximately 3,200 fewer students studying in the Winnipeg School Division today than before the pandemic.

“Parents who are in high socio-economic brackets are moving out of the public school system. They are choosing environments where tuition provides more resources for those schools to provide smaller classes, exceptional libraries, all sorts of provisions that are the rights of all students in Manitoba,” said Luanne Karn, a mother in WSD and founding member of Parents for Public Education MB.

Tuition has allowed private schools to make investments in COVID-19 protections and ensure smaller teacher-to-pupil ratios for remote learning, Karn said.

Despite the pandemic, funded independent schools and non-funded private institutions have recorded net increases of almost one per cent and 16 per cent, respectively, since 2019. The overall number of private schools has grown by six.

Teresita Chiarella, executive director of the Manitoba Federation of Independent Schools, pointed out there are always annual fluctuations in enrolment.

“Independent schools are part of the education system in Manitoba and offer parents a wide variety of choices in selecting an education for their children… The pandemic impacted many aspects of people’s lives and may have been a factor for families when making a choice,” Chiarella wrote in an email Friday.

The population of Manitoba homeschoolers has also spiked recently — although new figures indicate many people only joined the community temporarily during 2020-21.

Wiens argues a rebound in public school attendance requires principals and superintendents to let families know they are welcome back to their local K-12 building, and nothing will be held against them because they left for a time.

Karn, however, is not as optimistic such students will return, citing the fact WSD enrolment remains 10 per cent below pre-pandemic numbers.

As a result, the division received a 1.3 per cent decrease in operating funding for 2022-23.

Manitoba adjusted its funding formula to mitigate the pandemic’s impact on attendance, according to a provincial spokesperson.

The education department source said that process involved identifying students who would typically have attended public school were it not for the pandemic, analyzing homeschooling registrations and incorporating demographic data to refine growth models.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @macintoshmaggie