Every year, 3,000 youth drop out of high schools in our city. When I share that statistic with people in our community, they often can't believe it. I see why. We live in a prosperous city and province with one of the best education systems in the world and, yet, Alberta has one of the lowest graduation rates in Canada, at 74 per cent. This is just unacceptable.
In the recent Alberta budget, millions of dollars were devoted to funding private education, even though there appears to be very little public support for this... A majority of Albertans surveyed said that they did not support spending public dollars on private education. Why does the provincial government continue to transfer public dollars to private education without a clear mandate to do so?