Edmonton Public School Board muses cutting second language study requirements

Edmonton Public Schools currently requires students in Grade 4-9 to take a second language class but that may soon change. CTV News Edmonton's Miriam Valdes-Car

The Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) wants feedback from staff and families on reworking its policy requiring students to take classes for a language other than English.

Since 2006, Edmonton’s public schools have required students from Grades 4 through 9 to fulfill a second language requirement, often through but not limited to French or Spanish courses.

A new motion presented by Ward I Trustee Jan Sawyer on Tuesday considered scrapping that requirement altogether amid “ongoing changes in curriculum, instructional priorities, student demographics and system pressures as well as evolving perspectives on student programming and choice.”

It primarily recommends engaging with students, staff and families to gauge an appetite for instruction in a second language as it exists right now.

EPSB Superintendent Ron Thompson said getting feedback on the current requirement was an opportunity to revamp board policy.

“We value second language instruction, and second language instruction is not going anywhere,” he said during Tuesday’s board meeting.

“It’s the requirement to have it. Given the demographics of our schools and the context of our society, our schools are different than they were 20 years ago.”

He cited rising rates of students taking English as an Additional Language (EAL) courses as part of the consideration.

According to EPSB data, there were 27,791 enrolled students learning EAL within the division as of September 2025. At that time, 122,014 total students were enrolled across the division.

That number is a decrease from the same time in 2024, where 28,797 students were taking EAL courses, but Thompson argued the board didn’t see nearly the same amount of EAL learners 20 years ago when the policy was first instituted.

“When you consider that as a factor, when teachers are planning for instruction and planning for the school year, when we’ve got students that need to learn English but they have a second language already, it becomes really tricky,” he said.

EPSB currently offers classes such as Arabic, Mandarin, German, Spanish, Hebrew and more at certain schools.

While French is an official second language in Canada, it’s not a required course.

University of Alberta education assistant professor Ava Becker says there are many benefits to speaking more than just English — and the multiple languages offered by Edmonton Public Schools contributes to a well-rounded reflection of Canada.

“Culture and language are kind of impossible to separate from one another … When we’re learning languages together in a classroom context, where we’re learning so much more than vocabulary and grammar, we are learning cultural ways of communicating, but we’re also learning sociolinguistic (subtleties),” she told CTV News Edmonton.

Although the board of trustees would not do away with those courses, Becker said visibility matters.

“Seeing our community languages taught in schools lends an incredible amount of cultural capital to them. It says, ‘You matter,’” she said.

“For me, it should be a requirement at school because it is vitally important as part of our functioning in families and in community and in society.”

The EPSB trustees ultimately voted unanimously on an amendment to the original motion. The board will ask administration to provide a recommendation for what engagement would look like.

The board will then need to vote on whether to proceed with engagement on removing the second language requirement at a later date.

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Miriam Valdes-Carletti