MONTREAL – Things are quieter this year on the third floor at Westmount Park School, and a lot more conducive to learning.
Nathalie Lacroix-Maillette, the school’s principal, chalks up the change to fewer students in classes.
“It makes a big difference,” Lacroix-Maillette said.
The Quebec government’s latest efforts to shrink class sizes in elementary schools started in 2010 and took effect this year in Grades 5 and 6 in disadvantaged areas and Grade 4 in other areas.
For Westmount Park, which mainly draws its students from Point St. Charles, and other schools in disadvantaged areas, it means the class size maximum in Grades 5 and 6 dropped to 24 students from 29.
For Grade 4 in other areas, the ceiling is now 26 students.
The impact at Westmount Park this year is that instead of having two Grade 6 classes, there are three of them “and we have numbers of 17 and 18 per class,” Lacroix-Maillette said.
When the provincial government announced the three-year plan for smaller class sizes in 2009, the Quebec English School Boards Association said it would likely have little to no impact on the English community.
It argued many classes in English schools off the island of Montreal were already small.
And when the provincial budget was tabled last March, the association predicted that “virtually no students” would benefit from this year’s class size reductions, “virtually” no new classes would be created and “virtually” no new teachers would be hired because of the large territories and low-density student populations in many English primary schools.
“This is a major government expenditure, and it’s not acceptable that it is one from which English-speaking Quebec is basically excluded,” said its vice-president at the time.
Data provided to The Gazette by Quebec’s nine English school boards for the past two years suggest the new class size caps have only had a discernible impact so far on two boards in the Montreal metropolitan area, Laurier School Board and English Montreal School Board.
The Education Department says money set aside for the elementary level paved the way for adding 290 teachers and 236 classes in 2010-11 and 572 teachers and 465 new classes this school year.
But for English elementary schools in outlying regions, the lower ceilings over the past two years have resulted in the creation of just one new regular class.
And only 4.3 teachers were hired at the nine English boards as a result, according to their figures.
The effect of the class size reductions on English boards beyond the Montreal metropolitan area is negligible, said David D’Aoust, head of the Quebec English School Boards Association.
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“It’s not a major impact throughout the system.”
“We didn’t have any say in it,” D’Aoust said of the measure that applies to all elementary schools in Quebec.
“For francophone boards in heavily concentrated areas it would have an effect,” D’Aoust said.
The impact is difficult to gauge at the Commission scolaire de Montréal, Quebec’s largest school board. The CSDM says it has created new classes, but couldn’t say how many, nor whether their creation was directly related to smaller class sizes or rather to an increase in students.
It also couldn’t say which teaching positions were created because of smaller class sizes.
Serge Laurendeau, head of the Quebec Provincial Association of Teachers, defended the measure’s merit, pointing out that 70 or 80 per cent of the English school population in Quebec is in the Montreal metropolitan area.
Laurendeau questioned how boards are responding to the new ceilings. What they are doing is just paying extra compensation to teachers for oversize classes “and that wasn’t the goal,” he said.
“To me, it’s the application that is done by the boards, which is incorrect because the purpose was to reduce the number of students (per class) and to open up more classes,” Laurendeau said.
“If the impact is not that, well, it’s because of the boards that are not applying it properly.”
In some instances this year, several English boards paid extra compensation to teachers for classes that exceeded the new limits rather than setting up new classes. Boards are allowed to do that under the teachers’ collective agreement in certain circumstances.
Creating a new class is not always possible and efficient, said Robert Mills, director-general of the Lester B. Pearson School Board, who noted a whole school has to be staffed.
If you create two unreasonably small classes, it isn’t beneficial to the entire school because the other classes would be unduly large, Mills said.
Boards have to respect average class size rules “and the only way you can balance is in some cases, as a last resort, to put one or two extra children in a class,” he said.
The money spent on reducing class sizes in Quebec is the biggest single classroom expense in recent memory, according to one school board official.
The government is spending $119 million over three years to lower elementary class sizes.
The targeted levels are Grades 3 to 6 in schools in disadvantaged areas and class sizes in Grades 4 to 6 in other areas.
The $119 million doesn’t include money being spent on new infrastructure. The government announced an “historic” $300 million investment last spring to expand and build schools because of smaller class sizes and an increase in enrolment in some areas.
The Quebec English School Boards Association questions the expense and has argued in the past that there’s not that much evidence to suggest lowering class sizes is the best way to improve services to students.
However, teachers unions have clamoured for smaller class sizes. “It definitely makes a difference in terms of attention that you can offer,” said Ruth Rosenfield, head of the Montreal Teachers Association, whose members teach at the EMSB.
The new measure has had some impact on the Sir Wilfrid Laurier board, whose territory includes Laval, the Laurentians and Lanaudière regions, and the EMSB, an urban board with elementary schools in disadvantaged areas.
Twenty-four of the EMSB’s 38 elementary schools qualify for special inner city funding.
The Sir Wilfrid Laurier board created three new regular classes this school year because of the new limits, and 12 “multi-level” classes to accommodate the new ceiling in Grade 4. It also hired 3.36 extra teachers.
The EMSB said it created 13 new classes, including split classes, in 2010-11 to comply with the new maximums.
It opened 11 new regular classes this school year in the grades affected by the new limits.
It could not provide figures on Friday for how many classes it has in total in those grade categories.
The 11 new classes also represent the number of classes that were added because of new rules for weighting students with special needs when forming classes, the board said.
As of this school year, because of the teachers’ collective agreement certain categories of students with special needs now carry greater weight when classes are drawn up.
A student who is autistic, for example, would count as more than one body in the classroom. The weight for students with autism varies but they approximately count as three students when a class is made up, Rosenfield said.
The two measures together – smaller class sizes and weighting some students with special needs – really make a difference if you’re in an inner-city school at a grade level where the class size has come down and you also have to consider weighting certain students, Rosenfield said.
There is “absolutely no doubt” in Rosenfield’s opinion that the class size reductions make a difference at the EMSB.
Still, the board, which is grappling with declining enrolment, plans to close three elementary schools at the end of June.
Asked if it hired staff as a result of adding the regular and split classes over the past two years, the board said the teachers were already in its system as either recall or substitute teachers.
Due to declining enrolment, the total allocation of teachers in its youth sector has dropped, the board said.
By next fall – the final year of the three-year plan – class size maximums in Grades 3 through 6 in disadvantaged areas will have been lowered to 20 students.
Grades 4 through 6 in other areas will also have seen their class size maximums reduced to 26 students.
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