The Manitoba Government recently announced a change to the Smaller Classes Initiative, formerly known as the 20K-3 initiative. This change means Manitoba schools will no longer have to cap its K-to-3 class sizes at twenty.

"We aren't overly surprised," explained Western School Division (WSD) Superintendent Stephen Ross. "We've known that some of the promises that were made previously were going to be extremely hard to keep when we either haven't had space provided to keep up with that or funding to allow classes to be smaller. I think we've known for some time that it was likely to head this way."

A new Early Years Education Initiative, announced Tuesday, will replace the smaller classes initiative, including the funding that supported it. Education and Training Minister Ian Wishart noted the new initiative will give schools the power to follow what works for them.

According to Ross, this doesn't mean a whole lot for WSD as they've been trying to work with local support to have small classes.

"I think our biggest concern going ahead would be that like the former Tax Incentive Grant, that became part of guaranteed funding for school divisions, of which we (WSD) got $0. We've heard now that the class size money is also going to be guaranteed funding to school divisions," said Ross. "As a Division who always has great need and got no money, we are quite concerned about that. With the potential inequities in student funding going ahead we understand that things are challenging everywhere, but some divisions have hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional support through the class size initiative, we (WSD) don't have that. They will be able to address other issues that we (WSD) can't."

WSD has been doing its best to get to twenty students per class in each kindergarten to grade three class within the division since the 20K-3 was rolled out in 2011, however lack of space and funding has been a challenge.

"Over the last number of years, we haven't been able to do that because of not having additional space and waiting for a school announcement. At this point and time, it's a message that we knew was coming, that I guess both parents and teachers will have heard from the Government. That twenty isn't a number we are going to be able to manage. We are going to try and make class sizes as reasonable size as we can with the funding we have."

In terms of funding under the Smaller Class Size Initiative Ross noted WSD receives funding for under half a teacher. He added school Divisions all around them get multiple teaching positions through the grant.

"We consider that part to be fairly challenging for us to deal with. We know there are schools in Manitoba, outside of the City of Winnipeg, that are receiving up to fourteen teaching positions through this money and when we (WSD) get less than half a teacher. That's what concerns us going ahead. I'm not sure if the expectations for schools who receive almost no funding are going to be the same as the expectations for the schools that receive very large sums of money," said Ross.

Ross has recently communicated with the Provincial government staff about the funding and expectations of the funding going forward.

"The short-term impact is that there won't be really any change in Western School Division. We will continue as we have because it's not like we were going to have less or more dollars even if it was cut. Going ahead that can make a significant difference," said Ross. "If another school division had $400,000 in additional funding. Over four years that's $1.6million more they may have to work on other programming and we just don't have access to that money."

He concluded the Division is going to do what they can to provide the best learning environment for the kids with what they receive