WHAT PARENTS ACHIEVED TOGETHER IN 2025
As 2025 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to look back at everything Alberta parents accomplished this year - and to say thank you.
This year, parents like you reshaped education in Alberta. You pushed for accountability, fought for real school choice, stood up against bureaucratic overreach, and won major victories that will benefit families for years to come.
Every petition signed, email shared, survey completed, donation made, and meeting attended helped build a movement that grew louder, stronger, and more effective every single month.
Below is a month-by-month recap of the year you helped build - and the wins you helped secure.
January: Launching a Year of Accountability
We opened the year by exposing the absurd loophole in the Education Act that required a by-election in a year with a general election already scheduled, after allowing CCSD to go without a needed by-election for two years.
Our campaign - Parents Deserve School Trustee By-elections - put immediate pressure on the system and doubled as a dry run for our trustee survey infrastructure ahead of October’s general elections.
We also brought insights back from the International School Choice and Reform Conference, highlighting how geographical school assignment traps low-income families while strong school choice lifts them up. Our supporters were the first in Alberta to hear about this research.
February: Debunking Myths and Showing How Competition Works
In February, we dismantled several persistent myths about school board accountability. We showed how non-board options - charters, alternative programs, and independent schools - are more responsive to parents than elected boards that often ignore them.
We proved it with the case of Elk Island Public Schools: a school board that suddenly rushed to create a specialized kindergarten program only after a new charter school was announced in the region. Competition works - and we showed Albertans why.
We also continued correcting misinformation about charter schools, especially the ATA’s misleading claims about exclusivity and accountability.
March: A Huge Budget Victory for Families
March brought one of our biggest wins of the year. After we put pressure on them, the government announced the end of the Weighted Moving Average formula - a broken system that delayed funding and punished fast-growing schools.
The new model moves Alberta closer to a money-follows-the-child funding system, something we’ve pushed for relentlessly.
We also fact-checked the ATA’s claims about per-student funding and highlighted how Ottawa was overreaching into provincial education - including federal restrictions hurting First Nations students by limiting school choice options.
April: Teaching the History of School Choice
April marked the 200th birthday of Thomas D’Arcy McGee - Canada’s “Father of School Choice.” This gave us a powerful opportunity to remind Albertans that choice in education isn’t a modern invention; it’s a historic principle meant to protect minority rights.
We pushed for - and achieved! - improvements to Bill 51 to stop school boards from removing elected trustees for political reasons, and we sounded the alarm on federal funding of anti-parent initiatives being pushed into schools without transparency.
May: Pressing Leaders for Answers
When NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi headlined an event for anti-school-choice groups, we immediately challenged him to clarify his position on the rights of parents.
The threat of a teacher strike also emerged, and we dug deep into the mediator’s report to explain why negotiations stalled - and why real competition would help resolve the issue.
Finally, the Province announced consultations on school library content, and we mobilized parents across Alberta to make their voices heard.
June: Parents Overwhelmingly Reject Explicit Materials
June was a month of media battles, survey releases, and more evidence that parents’ concerns were justified.
The government released data from the library consultation, and it confirmed what we had been saying: parents strongly oppose sexually explicit material in school libraries, and parents overwhelmingly support setting reasonable age-appropriateness standards.
Librarians strongly disagreed - and that contrast helped illustrate why a one-size-fits-all school system simply cannot respond to all families.
With a teacher strike looming, we also proposed an Education Continuity Allowance to let funding follow students if schools closed.
July: Training, Community Work, and a Shocking Case of Abuse
In July, we hosted grassroots activism training and carried our message into neighbourhoods across Calgary. We continued pressing Nenshi for clarity on school choice.
We supported Lethbridge’s annual Stuff the Bus campaign and continued speaking publicly about the need for stronger trustees.
Then came the devastating case of Tirtha Mohanta, a non-verbal autistic boy injured in a CBE school. When the CBE’s internal review dismissed the seriousness of what happened, we launched a petition calling for an independent investigation - and thousands of parents joined us.
August: When School Boards Fail, Parents Step Up
August made one thing clear: school boards were falling behind parents’ expectations.
Boards refused to pilot curriculum, avoided addressing cellphone misuse, and allowed central office budgets to grow while classroom resources shrank.
We explained why school choice is the only real path to accountability.
We also dug into the draft Grade 7-9 Social Studies curriculum, helping parents navigate topics ranging from Indigenous history to free trade to the role of Sir John A. Macdonald.
September: Election Momentum and Another Major Win
Ahead of the school board elections, we organized a focus group to ensure that everyday parents - not activists - were represented in trustee coverage.
And as the threat of a teacher strike grew, we achieved an enormous win: the government adopted our Education Continuity Allowance proposal.
The Parent Payment Program ensured parents would receive $30 per child per day of lost instruction - and that unspent funds would follow students instead of staying locked in school board accounts.
We also continued our push for justice in the Tirtha Mohanta case.
October: Giving Parents the Information They Need
October was the month we delivered on one of the biggest commitments we made when the Alberta Parents’ Union was founded: to give parents the clearest, most comprehensive, and most honest information about school board trustee candidates anywhere in Alberta.
This wasn’t a small task - it was a massive undertaking that took hundreds of hours of work from our team.
We surveyed candidates across every school division, analyzed their responses, verified details, organized data, and published it all in a format parents could use quickly and confidently. Every email we sent, every phone call made, and every follow-up reminder to candidates was part of the promise we made on day one:
If parents were expected to vote, we would make sure they had the tools they needed to make an informed choice.
And not only did we keep that promise - but we had more trustee respondents and a more user-friendly page than the ATA!
Our 2025 School Trustee Candidate Survey became the single most detailed, accessible trustee guide available anywhere in Alberta. Thousands of parents used it before heading to the polls. Dozens of candidates told us they were asked about it at the doors. And for the first time, many parents felt they were finally choosing between real ideas - not just names on a ballot.
When Election Day arrived on October 20th, we reminded parents how powerful their vote is in low-turnout elections.
November: Celebrating 30 Years of Charter Success
In November, we published the results of school board elections across Alberta.
Later in the month, we celebrated 30 years of charter schools - and we used the anniversary to highlight a study showing charter students outperform geographically assigned public school students by more than 9 points on Provincial Achievement Tests.
We also continued correcting misinformation about charter enrollment and admissions.
December: Continuing the Work
December may be the final month of the year, but for the Alberta Parents’ Union, it’s never a slow one. While many organizations wind down, we used December to accelerate - reviewing the year’s victories, identifying gaps that still need to be filled, and laying the groundwork for our biggest year yet.
Behind the scenes, our team has been building new research projects, planning next year’s campaigns, strengthening our election-year infrastructure, and preparing the policy, communications, and grassroots strategies we’ll need to keep pushing Alberta toward true school choice and real accountability. We’ve also been meeting with parents, educators, and community leaders to map out the priorities that matter most heading into 2026.
We are ending 2025 stronger than we started - and preparing for an even bigger 2026.
Thank You for Making This Possible
Every victory this year was powered by parents like you.