Good morning. Nearly 750,000 students are stuck at home while the Alberta government and teachers’ union argue over pay and class size – more on that below, along with the Blue Jays’ series win and James Comey’s not-guilty plea. But first:

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Classrooms across Alberta have been sitting empty all week, after 51,000 teachers from the public, Catholic and francophone school systems walked off the job on Monday. It’s the first provincewide teacher strike in 23 years and the largest in Alberta’s history, affecting nearly 750,000 students from kindergarten to Grade 12.

At its core, this is a dispute over numbers: wages and classroom size.

Alberta teachers say salaries have not remotely kept pace with the rate of inflation, and their union is asking for a pay hike of 34.5 per cent over four years.

The province instead offered a 12-per-cent raise over the same period, which Premier Danielle Smith calls “very generous.” Teachers point out that unprecedented enrolment growth has pushed class size past its limit, without adequate support so they can address complex student needs. The province says it’s prepared to hire 3,000 new teachers and 1,500 educational assistants – a tally the union describes as a drop in the bucket.

Sounds like an impasse, right? That’s also the conclusion of The Globe’s education reporter, Dave McGinn, who told me neither side shows any sign of budging. “There is a noticeable lack of urgency on the province’s part,” he said, “and as long as public support remains in the teachers’ favour, I don’t see them taking a deal they don’t like.” He suspects it’ll be weeks – if not longer – before kids are back in class.

While they wait for some kind of breakthrough, let’s study up on a few of the other big numbers driving this school dispute.

13: months the union and province spent negotiating before this week’s strike. On Monday, the Alberta Teachers’ Association said the pair had resumed “bargaining-adjacent conversations that provide opportunities for conversations between the parties that will inform possible future proposals,” and no, we’re not sure what that means, either. It doesn’t seem as though they’re at the bargaining table.

80,000: new students who’ve entered Alberta’s public schools over the past three years. The province has experienced record-setting population growth, with more than 200,000 new residents arriving in 2023.

25: percentage of those residents who came from elsewhere in Canada, in part because of the government’s multimillion-dollar “Alberta is Calling” campaign, designed to attract burned-out big-city folk. One ad in downtown Vancouver read: “Find things you’d never expect. Like an affordable house.”

???: average classroom size in Alberta, because the province stopped collecting that data six years ago. But in Edmonton, which still tracks size, classes for core subjects such as math and English averaged between 31 and 35 students last year. One high school reported a class with 46 students. Another junior high had 56 kids in a room.

$8.6-billion: total investment Alberta has pledged to address growing student numbers, including building 130 new schools by 2030.

2027: year Edmonton will run out of public school space for its students. “You’re already seeing gymnasiums and teachers’ lounges being turned into classrooms,” McGinn told me. “The library becomes a cart that just gets wheeled up and down the halls.”

90: percentage of Alberta teachers who report that their workload is unmanageable. Much of that, they say, can be chalked up to the increasingly complex needs of their students – especially since the pandemic, which prompted learning loss, behavioural issues and mental health struggles that teachers do not feel adequately equipped to confront.

18,000: people who showed up in Edmonton over the weekend to support teachers, with rallies also held in Red Deer, Calgary and Lethbridge. “Years of seeing the public school system stretched to its limit has made parents pretty sympathetic,” McGinn said. “They recognize something has to give.”

Three weeks: the length of Alberta’s last teacher strike in 2002, which ended when the government ordered everyone back to work. This labour dispute is set to last at least that long, since the legislature’s next session doesn’t begin until Oct. 27. Smith said she has no plans to call lawmakers back early.

No starting pitcher? No problem: The Jays won their first playoffs series in nine years last night, beating the Yankees 5-2 in New York. They’ll start the American League Championship Series at home on Sunday against Detroit or Seattle (TBD tomorrow), and you can