Alberta's government needs to get creative to keep students learning if teachers do indeed go on strike.
This article was originally published in The Hub on September 24, 2025.
The countdown is on: An Alberta teacher strike could be coming to a school near you on October 6.
Parents are hopeful for an eleventh-hour resolution, but in the meantime, they’re scrambling to find alternative learning and child care options.
The provincial government has just weeks to prepare, so now is the time to be creative and resourceful. However, it has options to support both students and parents if a strike moves forward.
Priority one is to ensure that learning can continue as much as possible during this time. The first way to do that is direct funding to parents whose children attend an affected school.
Helping parents with educational and childcare expenses during a teacher strike is nothing new. British Columbia did it during its 2014 teacher strike, and Ontario did the same thing during its teacher strike of 2020.
Alberta doesn’t release the daily cost of teacher compensation, but Ontario’s experience provides a good parallel. Ontario’s government estimates it paid teachers $60 million per day in 2020 to educate just over two million students. Applying that ratio to Alberta’s 738,660 students in public, Catholic, and francophone schools, we can estimate the province spends at least $21.4 million per day on teacher salaries. The government should ensure that funding is invested back into children so that, strike or not, learning won’t need to grind to a halt barely a month into the new school year.
First, giving financial support to parents would be practical and effective. Parents of affected students could use that money towards enrollment in other programs, like independent school tuition, transportation for a charter school (if they can get a spot in either one), online courses, or homeschooling.
For families who choose to wait out the strike, they could use the funding for a wide range of educational activities. Just as they do in so many other areas, parents will make the best choices for their children in the event of a strike. That could mean a field trip to places like Heritage Park or Elk Island Provincial Park. Tutoring services to ensure students don’t fall behind would be an equally legitimate expense. Additional funding could be offered to families of elementary students, who may face more significant child care challenges.
Beyond direct payments, there are countless other ways to keep students active and learning. The government could negotiate deals with institutions like museums, swimming pools, and science centres to offer free admission to affected students. Partnerships with local public transit would be key, too: students can’t access these experiences if they can’t get to them.
The province should waive day pass fees to Kananaskis Country, as well as pitch to the federal government to offer free admission to Banff, Jasper, and Waterton Lakes National Parks for students and their families during a strike. There’s no better place to learn about geology, botany, weather, physics, ecosystems, and Canadian history than our own Rocky Mountains.
There are countless options when it comes to non-immersive learning, too. Why not fund ad-free memberships to online learning resources for coding, languages, mathematics, and other subjects for students? This would provide an opportunity for every student to access free and fun studies from home, tailored to their interests, knowledge, and skill levels.
Similarly, the province could subsidize textbook purchases and other specific educational materials from school resource stores.
High school students would need some special attention. Grades 10 to 12 are pivotal years where any lost class time could hurt university and college applications. Covering fees for any online high school course would help ensure that those students have options to avoid falling behind. The province should also work with organizations like universities, neighbourhood associations, and municipalities to support any “strike camps” they can offer students as a temporary stand-in while schools are shut down.
If the Alberta government truly wants to support students, invest in education, and ensure continuity in learning, it can act. There’s no need to accept having nearly a million students out of the classroom indefinitely.
Over the short term, it means being innovative and coming up with some unorthodox but beneficial solutions.
Looking further ahead, Alberta’s government needs to consider how to structure the system so that children’s learning and success can’t be used as contract bargaining leverage in the future. And that means diversification: ensuring there are enough thriving educational options to meet community needs, give parents a chance to find a best-fit education for their child, and have room to adapt to labour or other crises.
- Catharine Kavanagh is western stakeholder director at Cardus
September 24, 2025
