Sask. NDP promise to 'swing for the fences' for education with $2B funding announcement

The Saskatchewan NDP continues to roll out their pre-election campaign platform and on Tuesday leader Carla Beck promised an extra $2 billion for education.

Beck said the money would go to reducing class sizes through hiring more teachers and support workers.

She stood outside a Saskatoon school, flanked by teachers and parents, as she promised to increase classroom funding by $2 billion over four years.

“We’ll ensure that we have more teachers and educational assistants are hired so that kids have the supports and attention that they need,” Beck said.

Figures from the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation (STF) suggest that Saskatchewan is trailing in education funding per student. The national average is just over $15,000 annually. In the west, Manitoba exceeds that average while Saskatchewan trails all provinces at $11,343 per student.

“Classrooms are way over packed, I mean they’re full and teachers are stretched to the max,” President of CUPE Saskatchewan Kent Pederson said. “There aren’t enough EAs for schools so that students have the actual supports and resources they need to learn. That is a problem. That is a broken school.”

The Saskatchewan Party disagrees. In a written statement it said:

“Overall, school divisions in our province are receiving $2.22 billion in operating funding for the 2024-25 school year - which includes the largest ever increase in school operating funding.”

Premier Scott Moe also responded on social media, posting to X that he saw the NDP’s promise and wanted to remind people the number of schools the last NDP government closed.

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“Just a reminder that the last time the NDP was in government, they closed 176 schools. That’s an average of one school a month closed for 16 years,” Moe said in part of his post on X. “The best indicator of future behaviour is past behaviour,” Moe’s post also said.

Classroom funding promises to be a major campaign issue as the opposition leader comes out swinging in her first pre-campaign commercial showing her playing baseball.

“I will say this. I still have blisters from swinging that bat. It took a few but the one thing that I always could do was bat,” Beck said. I wasn’t necessarily the best baseball player but I could hit.”

The campaign promises to be hard hitting as the parties begin work to score points with voters.

-- With files from Drew Postey.