High school students in Fort McMurray saw a decline in their testing scores in the last year, and this decline was across the board and occurred at both public and Catholic schools in the area. Both district had fewer students who received testing scores of excellent and acceptable when the students took their diploma examinations. The Catholic schools in the area had an acceptable test score for almost 80% of their students, while this rate was 85% the previous year. Only 10.3% of the Catholic school students scored excellent, and this was down from almost 15% from a year earlier. In public schools only 76.1% scored acceptable, and this was 82% previously. The excellent standard was met by 15.1% of students this year compared with 17.6% for the previous year.

The decline in testing scores for high school students in Fort McMurray is being investigated to see if offiials can determine the cause and reverse this trend. Fort McMurray Public School District Superintendent Doug Nicholls explained “The courses being offered, the students taking them, the teachers delivering them, all those come into play. We’ll look on a subject by subject basis, because not all subjects showed a decline. The end objective of all systems is to graduate students — we do that well.” George McGuigan, the Superintendent of FMCSD, stated “While results have dipped some overall, students are still graduating at a very high percentage and students are not dropping out. We continue to find ways of alternative programming to keep at risk students in school and moving forward.”