Citizenship and Immigration committee  We have been having conversations. We've had both formal and informal requests looking for support go to both the provincial and the federal governments. Our board reached out to every school board across the country and asked them to participate in a joint advocacy, knowing that

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For us, this is an exceptional circumstance, where we had an influx of a large number of Syrian refugee students from one country at a targeted, specific time. We needed to rally support for those students in a specialized setting to ensure that they could transition from their h

Citizenship and Immigration committee  As I said, we receive refugee students throughout the year, every school year, but it comes in fits and spurts throughout the school year, and some of the students who come have a high degree of English. They are not from war-torn countries, and they have not experienced trauma t

Citizenship and Immigration committee  For example, we get pots of money for English-language learners. We know that we need to provide more support for our English-language learner students, as would our colleagues at Calgary Catholic. We also recognize that when we are juggling money, it means that our class sizes b

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We've had a modest class size increase this year; that's correct.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  This school year we were given our budget. Actually, ironically, we have a public board meeting later on, right after this meeting, to debate our budget. We have a hold-the-line budget from the province, so we have rolled out exactly the same money to all of our schools and class

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Not in a deficit situation, because what we've done is juggle resources. We get funded on a per student basis and that is to last throughout the entire school year, so what we do is juggle and provide resources where they are needed. When we take money from a certain pot to help

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Yes, I believe that's correct. If I can put it into perspective, the number of students we've received is the equivalent of five elementary schools.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  Sorry, one elementary school at 414 students, yes.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We were very disturbed to find that one of our schools was tagged twice with disrespectful language. It gave us an opportunity to talk to our students and our community about the importance of including everybody, recognizing that there's diversity, and ensuring that each and eve

Citizenship and Immigration committee  I believe that would be a reasonable speculation, and that would be my understanding. In conversations that I've had with our minister of education, we believe that in order to support students, we need financial support as well. As I stated earlier, while we open our doors to

Citizenship and Immigration committee  We are part of the Canadian School Boards Association through our provincial body of the Alberta School Boards Association. I'd like to comment that we were not consulted. We were just asked to keep track of costs.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  No, no.

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is correct. Within the province of Alberta, and I cannot speak to other provinces, we have a drop-dead date of September 30, in which all school boards throughout the province of Alberta receive funding for each and every student in our school districts. Beyond that, schoo

Citizenship and Immigration committee  That is correct. We were informed that students would come into the province of Alberta, but we were not consulted. We were told by the province to keep track of all costs to date for all of the Syrian refugee students who would enter into our system. We believe that this was a p