Shouldn’t be Catholic separate school boards/districts/divisions tagged with operator:type=public instead of operator:type=religious? A glance on Catholic separate school boards as operator presents on NSI (AB separate school districts primarily, someone might want to look the presets for those in ON and SK) shows many are tagged together with operator:type=religious which look rather wrong since separate school boards are public bodies much like with their secular public school counterparts.
It’s a blurry line…
They are public insofar as the school board trustees are publicly elected (a timely discussion point given the election was last week) and follow essentially the same operating procedures and rules as the ‘public’ boards. However, the respective dioceses do exact some power over them insofar as the trustees must be Roman Catholics, and one of the expressed purposes of the Catholic school boards is to promulgate “Catholic education”. In this respect the boards are intrinsically religious, even though they’re not directly operated by the church itself.
As such… to me you could tag them operator:type=public, but certainly operator:type=religious isn’t wrong. 
Well, as for Alberta Catholic school boards with NSI listing, so far, Calgary Catholic School District and Elk Island Catholic Schools have operator:type=public (the latter was modified by me, it was already on NSI but had no associated Wikidata). Rest were tagged operator:type=religious.
haven’t looked on examples from Ontario and Sask yet.
It seems like almost all Catholic separate school boards save perhaps CCSD have been lumped under operator:type=religious in NSI.
Are these schools also being tagged religion=* denomination=*? Is every religious school in the province run by a separate school board, or are some operated by private entities?
Okay, a bit of a history lesson:
Alberta’s education system (Saskatchewan’s too) descends from the situation in the Northwest Territories in the 19th Century, which originally left education in the hands of the churches. In 1884 the territorial government established a state school system still predicated on the churches exercising control over the administration of the schools; by definition all of these schools were “religious”. The system was predicated on the continuing operation of Protestant and Catholic schools run by their respective churches.
However, over the ensuing 20 years, the churches’ powers over the administration of the school system were reduced, and ordinances were introduced which limited the amount of religious teaching in the classroom. The territory’s original Board of Education, the administrative board that oversaw operation of the school system, was composed of an equal number of Catholic and Protestant representatives in the 1880s, but that was quickly changed to a majority Protestant administration who wanted religious instruction in the classroom curtailed. The Catholics strongly objected to the idea of the church itself having limited direct authority over the schools. The Protestant schools became “non-denominational”—a compromise to deal with the fact that in reality Protestant beliefs were *multi-*denominational, and they didn’t want conflicting doctrines taught to their kids outside their respective churches—and these became known as “public schools”. The Catholic schools became known as “separate schools”, and although they were government-funded and the church’s direct authority over them was limited these schools were still allowed to promulgate Catholic beliefs. Essentially wherever you read “Catholic school” it’s synonymous with “separate school” and vice versa.
When Alberta (and Saskatchewan) became a province in 1905 the foundational legislation that created it (the Alberta Act) made guarantees that the system of “public” and “separate” schools would continue and the Catholics, as religious minority, would still have the right to have their separate schools. This is a constitutional law and so the existence of “separate” (Catholic) school districts is considered a constitutional right in Alberta (and in Saskatchewan, where the corresponding Saskatchewan Act is functionally identical).
So, even though the Catholic school districts are nominally Catholic and do teach religion as a compulsory subject, they are government-funded in the exact same way as the “public” school districts. Education is nominally funded through property taxes, and when you buy a property you have to declare to the municipal government whether your tax dollars will support the public or separate school district. The separate schools are “public” insofar as anybody can choose to have their kids go to a Catholic school; students and parents don’t have to be Catholic. Teachers technically don’t have to be Catholic, but they do have to agree to abide by Catholic teachings and lead a Catholic ‘lifestyle’ as a condition of their employment. The school board trustees, the arms-length administrators of each school district, are elected by popular vote in municipal elections just as the public school board trustees are (electors are only allowed to cast a vote for one of either their respective public or separate school board trustee, not both); the separate board trustees must be Catholic.
There are also private schools, which operate outside of the purview of the public and separate school districts and charge tuition. Some of them receive government funding, some don’t. Many of them are religious in nature, but the relationship between the school administration and a church varies from school to school. There are a few private schools in Alberta operated directly by local congregations (e.g. a few schools operated directly by Mennonite churches). The Roman Catholic Church doesn’t operate private schools directly, but there are private schools that are unabashedly Roman Catholic. (E.g. this one added to the map by yours truly, which nominally follows policies of Regnum Christi and has a few priests on its board of directors.)
Soooooo, after all this background, back to the question at hand: are the separate school districts “religious” as operator within the meaning of our OSM tags? As I wrote before the boards themselves are composed of Catholics, the entire purpose of the separate school districts is to provide “Catholic education”, and the curriculum has a compulsory religious studies component. However, the church itself doesn’t operate the school districts, there are no church officials on the school boards, and they have very limited authority to dictate school policy. The students don’t have to be Catholic, and don’t have to participate in church activities.
I think anybody could convince me that either operator:type=public or operator:type=religious is correct, but maybe the most accurate tagging is:
operator:type=public
religion=christian
denomination=roman_catholic
?
That reflects the fact they are nominally Catholic but their operations are ‘public’, I think.
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Thanks for the backgrounder! I suspect the tagging in NSI was not particularly intentional. We’ve had other cases where operator:type=* was added to entries based on cursory inspection without the benefit of local knowledge. For that reason we tend to scrutinize further additions of less essential keys like this. I think we’d be open to whatever you all decide.
Your description of separate schools actually sounds reminiscent of Catholic schools where I grew up in the U.S. in terms of enrollment and curriculum, but of course quite different in terms of direct parochial administration and tuition – the aspects that people probably infer from operator:type=*. (We also have a smattering of independent Catholic schools that are operated by a private lay board under very limited Church supervision.) Leaving the religious details to religion=* and denomination=* makes a lot of sense to me. It would indicate both religious orientation and public administration simultaneously, and it’d be more consistent with the private schools you’ve mapped.
Well, for Ontario, without getting into the weeds in terms of history, public schools there were once divided between Catholic separate schools and Protestant public schools, both Anglophone and Francophone. ON’s public schools became non-denominational in the late 1980s; the separate schools (either Anglophone or Francophone) can now be either Catholic or Protestant, but most separate schools remain largely Catholic, with the only Protestant separate school belonging to the province’s only Protestant separate school board.