Area members of the legislature visited the Living Sky School Division central office Sept. 26 for a meeting with the board of education and senior staff.
Among the topics discussed was the planned grade reconfiguration that will see Battlefords public school students going into Grade 8 in September of 2013 and students going into Grade 7 in 2015 attending classes at the North Battleford Comprehensive High School.
The Living Sky School Division Board of Education passed a motion to that effect two weeks prior in a move to alleviate the overcrowding of elementary schools in the Battlefords.
Visiting MLAs agreed with the board's assertion that the public seems to be aware the only option to deal with the overcrowding is grade configuration.
Director of Education Randy Fox said, "I thought my phone would be ringing once it hit the paper, but it hasn't. I think people know something has to be done to address the overcrowding."
Cut Knife-Turtleford MLA Larry Doke, who attended the meeting along with Battlefords MLA Herb Cox and Rosthern-Shellbrook MLA Scott Moe, said, "I can honestly say I haven't had a call."
Vice-chair Ronna Pethick said they had, of course, met with the school community councils, and while there were concerns, they didn't meet too much opposition.
"The bottom line is we didn't feel we had any options," she said, pointing out that some of the community's elementary schools are at 150 per cent of their capacity.
"Because there is such great overcrowding in the elementary schools something has to be done.
The MLAs heard the history leading up to the decision to reconfigure from Glenn Wouters, chair of the committee charged with looking at the issue.
"You've got to go back 10 years," said Wouters. "Ten years ago the public board closed two schools - that resulted in a net saving of over $2 million - and now we're talking about being overcrowded. The question being asked by the community is, 'why did we close those two schools?'"
Wouters said the answer was simple.
"What's happened since we closed those two schools is that the elementary schools, all but Bready, have introduced pre-kindergarten. At six classrooms, 20 students a classroom, that's 120 students there. At McKitrick school, they made a child carecentre. They used three classrooms for that. So we have nine or 10 classrooms that have been taken out of operation. At the same time we're told that the comprehensive high school can hold 300."
Even with the closure of those two schools and the addition of pre-kindergarten students, Wouters pointed out, there's still enough room in the system for the total number of students.
Wouters said from 1981 to 2011 there was a declining population in all the schools.
"We went from 3,500 to 2,500 students," he said, "Of those 2,500 students, 1,100 of them are aboriginal. In 1981, we only had a handful of aboriginal students, so you can see that the community has changed. The aboriginal population is a very important factor in our schools here."
He added that the kindergarten enrolments are up this year, but so are general enrolments.
"The surprising thing this fall is our enrolments went up. Our kindergarten enrolment went up a little, but our school enrolments all went up. There was an inward migration of students into our community last year and that's why our populations are even larger than we thought they were going to be."
Being able to offer more programming to Grade 7 and 8 students was also part of the decision, said Wouters,
"We did have a meeting at the Comp with all our school committees. They had a tour of the Comp,and they came out of that tour saying 'oh, there's a lot of programming that we can now put in at Grade 7, 8 and 9 that they don't get back in their elementary school.' And anyone who's been through the Comp knows the kind of extra programming we can put in place.
"We were told by the [Ministry of Education], 'you have enough space, use it, we will not build you new space,'" said Wouters. "But I think the argument around programming at the Comp is another one the board feels is a reason we've got the right decision for we want to do."
That decision to move the students will see renovations taking place at the North Battleford Comprehensive High School that will, hopefully, include a second gymnasium. Because the message has been that the Ministry will not approve building new space, the plan is to renovate to include a second gym within the existing footprint, MLAs were told.
By raising the roof, a gym can be created where the Grade 9 junior construction shop is currently located.
Brian Bossaer, facilities manager, said that although the existing gym is a large space, with that many grade levels in the school, full programming would be difficult. With a second gym, said Bossaer, the lower grades won't be bumped from programming by senior groups.
"We won't have senior sports superseding junior levels," he said.
The MLAs asked what the cost of this renovation was going to be.
Chief Financial Officer Lonny Darroch said neither the cost nor the method of paying for the project is known yet, but that the ministry asked the division to get applications worth about $3 million on file with them.
He noted, because the second gym would require raising the roof, it will represent about two-thirds of the total cost. The final cost will be determined once the plans are finalized.
The division is working with Daryl Richter, manager of capital projects for the Ministry of Education, who made a visit to the community earlier this year to go over the floor plan of NBCHS classroom by classroom.
Director of Education Randy Fox assured that MLAs the plan is, as much as possible, to have Grades 7, 8 ad 9 together within the facility.
"We're trying to design to have them together. There are certain limitations when not building a new facility, but that's what we trying to design around," he said.
MLAs were also told about another meeting planned with the City of North Battleford in an ongoing discussion about future plans for the growth of the city.
"In November we're going to be meeting with folks from City of North Battleford," said Fox, "and we will be talking about space allocation that they are making for another school to be built in North Battleford. There is going to come a day when that is going to have to happen. It could be building a shared facility of some kind, potentially maybe closing another of our schools, I don't know."
It will be sometime in the future, said Fox, "but it's on our minds."
