Groundwork is a pilot project that will test new paths to connect the Edmonton Journal newsroom with our community in more powerful ways. Find out the details and get involved at edmontonjournal.com/groundwork

Brooke Pinsky decided to use her late husband’s life insurance payout — about $2,500 a month — to hire an educational assistant privately this year.

It’s a lot of money. But her daughter, 13-year-old Britlynn Keys, has autism and is non-verbal. Pinsky couldn’t see a way to have her safely return to class in person during the pandemic, or learn anything without in-person support at home.

If back-to-school in a pandemic was tough for most students and parents this year, it was many times harder for students needing extra support.

They weren’t just dealing with the effects of the lockdown, online school choices and new health protocols. They’re also trying to navigate a set of cuts that predated the pandemic that reduced educational assistants in the classrooms and decimated early learning programs across the city.

“They say it’s a choice. But if you don’t have the money to be able to provide the supports that your child is going to need to learn from home, then it’s not really much of a choice,” said Pinsky, who hired her daughter’s laid-off educational assistant in May, when it was obvious she was struggling to learn online without her.

Pinsky said Britlynn couldn’t return to the classroom in September because she can’t wear a mask or understand the social distancing requirement. The school refused any financial support for the in-person educational assistant; they instead provide a banker’s box of worksheets and material every few weeks.

The Edmonton Journal heard these stories when we reached out through Groundwork, surveying students, parents and teachers about the return to school during COVID-19. They said fellow students, family members and friends are not getting the support they need as a global pandemic and local education cuts collide.

Nancy Kirkpatrick’s son used to get two 10-minute movement breaks a day to control the physical ticks caused by his Tourette syndrome. Now he can’t. The educational assistant is no longer available. So he’s trying to learn online.

Keltie Marshall is now homeschooling or acting as an online educational assistant for her four children with Tourette syndrome and multiple different learning disabilities.

Her fifth child is trying to make it work at the local alternative high school. But it’s not great. She requested help reading a test but was turned down because the school had no educational assistant.

“Every school board is making different priorities,” said Shantel Sherwood, who heard stories from across the province through the Facebook group Hold My Hand AB. Her son finally got an assistant and “an amazing teacher” this year. It’s like a bizarre lottery, she said.

So why are parents seeing less support at a time when they need more? There are several moving pieces and four in particular.

The first is the budget. The UCP promised to maintain or increase education funding during the spring 2019 election. They’ve kept that promise if you look at total funding, said Colin Aitchison, press secretary for Alberta Education Minister Adriana Lagrange.

“The new K-12 funding model continues to protect our most vulnerable children, including children with severe disabilities, and Alberta continues to have the earliest intervention program for children in Canada,” he said in a statement last week.

But funding has not kept pace with costs and student population growth, and a new funding model means some boards are preparing for deep cuts to individual budgets as the provincial bridge financing starts to run out next year.

The Sturgeon Public School Division, north of Edmonton, for example, is anticipating a loss of $10 million from its $70-million budget over four years, school year 2019-20 to 2022-23, said trustee Terry Jewell. That now means cutting on classroom aides because they already cut central office staff.

The second piece to this puzzle came in the February provincial budget. The UCP announced major changes specific to early learning — the PUF or program unit funding. It cut per-child funding roughly in half for many preschoolers in language therapy and some medical therapies, and imposed stricter age limits on when help could be accessed.

Many public programs can no longer afford children with mild and moderate delays, and older kids must enter regular kindergarten to see any support. By the numbers, Edmonton Catholic went from helping 895 children last year to this year helping 314, and Edmonton Public closed 26 of its 32 early learning locations.

Third, the pandemic hit. That meant online learning and temporary cuts to thousands of educational assistants in the spring.

That funding was later reinstated, but the fourth announcement landed in June. The UCP eliminated the health/education regional collaboration or RCSD grant, which previously supported teams of health specialists to support students from kindergarten through Grade 12. The government gave the money directly to each board instead, no strings attached, saying the move would reduce red tape.

The impact of this fourth piece has been hard to track. But those speech language pathologists, occupational therapists and other specialists were employed by AHS and not by the school boards, meaning they were laid off.

Of the 294 staff the provincial health union has been able to track, only 42 have left AHS. Forty-six used their seniority to displace other staff, which means they might still be helping children in other programs. A full 144 took other vacant AHS positions, many in the COVID-19 testing centres, instead of in roles making use of their specialized skills, said Mike Parker, president of the union, the Health Sciences Association of Alberta.

That means, even though the

UCP gave the funds to school boards, those staff didn’t follow the money back to the classroom.

Edmonton Catholic said it used every penny to hire a new, internal special supports team to replace the AHS staff, posting publicly for the jobs and securing more hours and greater flexibility than it had before for students.

The board had to cut in other areas, said superintendent of learning services Corine Gannon. It’s now down seven educational assistants compared to last year. Also lost were 148 people in other specialties, including multicultural animators, family-school liaison workers, psychologists and physical education specialists.

Edmonton Public took the internal specialists it could no longer afford in the early learning program and shifted them to its nine new specialized teams for K-12. It’s still short roughly eight speech language pathologists and six occupational therapists of the 108 full-time equivalent positions available to students last year, but it hired seven extra mental health professionals, said assistant superintendent Leona Morrison.

Its bigger loss was the 429 educational assistants it laid off in September to cope with budget pressures, said Edmonton Public board chair Trisha Estabrooks.

“The role of EAS becomes even more critical, I would argue, during a pandemic when you think about the support our children need when they’re learning online.”