Schools bursting at seams

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This article was published 03/09/2016 (3517 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Some Winnipeg students will start classes next week in the school hallway.

Some will take health class in the cafeteria, others will hold classes in the library or computer room, and many more children will learn in more than 200 modular classrooms or old-fashioned portables in the Winnipeg, Seven Oaks and Pembina Trails school divisions.

Divisions are begging the province for new schools, for additional classrooms and for any kind of portable they can get.

The year-old Amber Trails School will have partitioned classrooms in the hallway, Seven Oaks superintendent Brian O’Leary said.

“We’ve opened the new Amber Trails School, but it’s 150 kids over capacity, and we’re on our way to 300 over capacity,” O’Leary said. The school was built for 70 students per grade, it’s now at 100 per grade.

Another 200 homes will open in Amber Gates by next fall, O’Leary said. “We’ve discussed an eight-classroom addition to Amber Trails and then a new K-to-5 school. We would put it in the Amber Gate subdivision. We have a site on Templeton (Avenue).”

That’s in a division that’s about to open the city’s only new school this fall, École Riviere Rouge in Riverbend.

“We’ve had two classrooms in some libraries,” said Winnipeg School Division chairman Mark Wasyliw.

“It’s basically the northwest corner (of Winnipeg) and our French-immersion schools.”

Wasyliw said the division desperately needs Education Minister Ian Wishart to approve a new school for the new Waterford Green and Canterbury Meadows subdivisions, whose residents are exacerbating crowding problems in the northwest corner in schools such as Prairie Rose, Garden Grove, Meadows West and Shaughnessy Park. In addition, the division says there’s a critical need for a new high school for its northwest corner.

Wasyliw said this week Wishart told trustees Waterford Green is a go, but there’s been nothing in writing.

An aide to Wishart said Friday, “On the eve of the pre-election blackout period and in the absence of necessary assessments, the previous NDP government announced a new K-8 school for the Waterford Green area.

“This project is currently in the required assessment phase. The public schools finance board is currently working with the (division) to review enrolments, and is awaiting the final agreement between the (division) and the land vendor.

“We remain committed to maximizing value for taxpayers’ money while strengthening the services most important to Manitobans, including education,” the aide said.

Nevertheless, the proposed school for 500 students in Waterford Green likely won’t be big enough when it does open, Wasyliw said. The division has heard a developer is considering as many as 7,000 more units adjacent to those subdivisions.

Pembina Trails wants its own new high school. Fort Richmond Collegiate and Shaftesbury High have many portables, and there’s no more land on which to expand Vincent Massey Collegiate, superintendent Ted Fransen said.

The division has asked Wishart for a high school in Waverley West.

“We own land at the corner of Kenaston Boulevard and the (future) extension of Bison Drive. It will be on the same property as a future K-to-8 school,” Fransen said.

It would accommodate 1,200 students and allow Grade 9 students to be taught in all of the division’s high schools, some of which can now handle only grades 10 to 12. It would open as the 14th-largest school in Manitoba, and have more students than six rural school divisions.

But such a facility costs big bucks.

Even as some schools with dwindling numbers of students have been kept open since 2008 by a provincial moratorium on closing schools, other schools far distant from those empty seats are beyond bursting, serving areas of enormous growth yet to have their own schools.

“We’re requiring a classroom addition for West Kildonan Collegiate. We’re using the library and cafeteria for health,” O’Leary said. “At Garden City and Maples Collegiate, we’re at 95 per cent capacity.”

“We will face some serious (high school) pressure in the next five years” because the area’s rapid growth is in younger families, O’Leary said.

In the Winnipeg division, “We need significant expansion of Brock Corydon School,” Wasyliw said. J.B. Mitchell needs three classrooms, Mulvey six classrooms and a portable, Andrew Mynarski VC three classrooms.

Stanley Knowles is the only non-high school with more than 1,000 students: “It’s got 13 (portables) already; they’re already using the multipurpose room as a classroom.”

Fransen said the southeast and Waverley West are pressure-cookers for Pembina Trails.

“There’s significant immigration with larger families — Fort Richmond is a hotbed,” he said.

“Over 50 per cent of the students attending Fort Richmond Collegiate were not born in Canada. There are over 50 languages spoken in the home in Acadia, Ryerson, Dalhousie, Fort Richmond Collegiate.”

At R.H.G. Bonnycastle School, “We’ve stripped away the music class and the lab. There are classes in the library,” Fransen said.

Brandon is right at the top of the list alongside Winnipeg in its desire for a new school, in the city’s south end.

“Some of our schools are beyond capacity. Others still have some room. We will start this year with about 200 more students than last September. At the rate we are growing, all K-8 schools in Brandon will be beyond capacity when we start the school year in September 2018,” Brandon School Division chairman Mark Sefton said.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca