Sir William Osler to open for French milieu early years

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This article was published 19/05/2015 (4126 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Parents at two Fort Rouge schools are looking to move forward following a heated and drawn-out debate over a school swap.

The Winnipeg School Division (WSD) announced on May 11 that it will not be going ahead with a swap between Earl Grey School (340 Cockburn St.) and École LaVérendrye (290 Lilac St.) and instead decided to reopen Sir William Osler (1600 Grant Ave.) this September as a nursery to Grade 1 satellite facility of French milieu LaVérendrye.

“I think this is the right decision and I am confident that the board has got it right,” WSD board chair Mark Wasyliw said. “I am obviously concerned that not everybody is happy with this decision and we need to mend some fences with parents that were dead set on a swap.”

According to Wasyliw, after much community consultation opening Sir William Osler became an obvious solution to overcrowding at LaVérendrye that would disrupt families in the area the least.

Trustees feared that licenses for three daycares in Earl Grey wouldn’t be transferable in a school swap and important programming for at-risk youth at the neighbouring community club would not be as accessible to students, Wasyliw said.

“It became very complicated and a swap wasn’t necessarily easy,” he said. “And it was going to disrupt a number of lives and especially a number of at-risk youth.”

Wasyliw also says William Osler provides space for LaVérendrye to grow. The facility can accommodate about 200 students and the opening will free up five classrooms at LaVérendrye.

“The LaVérendrye community is desperate for licensed daycare spaces. They will now have the luxury of having the space where they can actually establish licensed day care in their school,” Wasyliw said.

However, some parents at LaVérendrye are feeling blindsided by the decision to open William Osler for nursery to Grade 1 students only.

“This is definitely not what we were expecting and it wasn’t in the options that they had given us, so we’re quite shocked about that,” said LaVérendrye Community Council chair Stacy Huard.

Huard says parents at LaVérendrye are still trying to understand how trustees came to their decision, adding that in the consultation process William Osler “had been proposed as a nursery to Grade 6 separate milieu school.”

Huard says the community council is still in conversation with trustees and is hoping to get more information on how the satellite school is going to work and how daycare issues will be addressed.

There will be a town hall meeting on Tues., May 26 at 6:30 p.m. at Kelvin High School to answer some of these questions.

Huard is also concerned about the division’s plan to shuttle young students between LaVérendrye (the main drop-off and pickup point for parents) and William Osler, as well as splitting up the younger and older students.

“They’ll be losing out on mentoring the little kids,” Huard said. “It’s breaking up the community.”

The LaVérendrye Community Council is planning to survey parents to see what the council should do next.

Darryl Balasko, Earl Grey parent council chair, said the Earl Grey community is willing to be part of the solution by looking at a dual track French and English program in the future.

“What LaVérendrye wanted, to keep all the kids together, the community together, is everything that we wanted to do, and with a swap we would have lost that,” Balasko said. “Now I understand the problems with Osler in that not all the children can be together in one place, but that’s part of a larger issue.”

Balasko said he has spoken with trustees about reviewing catchment areas and instituting enrollment caps at schools in the area. According to Wasyliw, boundaries haven’t been adjusted for 30 years and changing catchment areas is a long process that will take a number of community consultations.

“The reason why it hasn’t been looked at for so long is that it gets people angry,” Wasyliw said. “People will be upset through the course of it but it has to be done.”

For now, stakeholders will be working on mending broken bonds in the community and will be looking forward to reaching a long-term solution to French language education in the south district.

“I can understand why they’ve advocated for their school so much because nobody wants to have things happen,” Huard said. “It is the situation that the school division put us into and they made this happen. It would be nice to (mend bonds with neighbours).”

Said Wasyliw: “We want to regain these peoples’ trust and show that we have the long-term interests of their children at heart and this is a workable solution and hopefully we can convince them once they get past the shock of this, that this is the right thing to do.”

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