| Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools | |
|---|---|
| Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division No. 29 | |
| Board office location | 6 St. Vital Avenue St. Albert, Alberta, Canada |
| Number of schools | 17[1] |
| 2009/2010 budget (CAD $ millions) | $66.3[2] |
| Number of students | 6,251[1] |
| Chair of the Board | Lauri-Ann Turnbull |
| Superintendent | David Keohane |
| Elected Trustees | Dave Caron Joan Crockett Jacquie Hansen Rosaleen McEvoy Cathy Proulx Noreen Radford Lauri-Ann Turnbull |
| Official Site | |
Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools (or formally, the Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division No. 29 (GSACRD)) is a public school board serving St. Albert, Alberta, Canada, Morinville, Alberta, Canada and Legal, Alberta, Canada.
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St. Albert and its immediate region is an historically French-speaking and Roman Catholic region in the otherwise mostly Anglophone and Protestant province of Alberta. Under the terms by which Alberta joined Canada as a province in 1905 under the Alberta Act, resident tax payers were guaranteed that minority faith separate schools, either Protestant or Roman Catholic, would continue to receive government funding, as they had under the Northwest Territories' system to that point as a result of the Manitoba schools question. In most of the province "public schools" are secular and separate schools are denominational in nature (which are also publicly-funded). In St. Albert, however, since Roman Catholics were originally the majority, public schools are run by a Catholic school board, and the separate schools are Protestant, there are no secular schools. Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools is therefore both a public and Catholic board.
In October, 2009 it was reported that a man formerly employed by GSACRD had filed a human rights complaint against the district.[3] The man, Jan Buterman, claimed that in 2008 he had been removed from the district's substitute teaching list after he declared his intention to transition from a female to male. In a letter to Buterman dated October 14, 2008 the division's deputy superintendent, Steve Bayus stated,"Since you made a personal choice to change your gender, which is contrary to Catholic teachings, we have had to remove you from the substitute teacher list."[4] As of October 15, 2009, the Alberta Human Rights Commission had accepted Buterman's complaint.[5]
One anomaly of the school system in Alberta is that the town of Morinville has only a public Catholic high school (part of the Greater St. Albert Catholic Regional Division), and no secular or Protestant high schools of any kind, when the surrounding Sturgeon County, is a part of the public Sturgeon School Division.[6] This lead, in 2011, for non-Catholic parents to start an advocacy campaign to secularize education in Morinville.[7][8]