MORE KIDS, MORE SCHOOLS
New facilities for all districts will help compensate for city’s phenomenal rate of growth
More than 6,000 students will find themselves in brand new classrooms in their own communities starting this fall as all three area districts will throw open the doors to new schools, alleviating the load on other facilities.
The addition of four new schools to the Calgary Board of Education roster will increase the overall capacity within the district by 3,000 students, says Dany Breton, CBE superintendent for facilities and environmental services.
“That will help relieve the pressures that we’ve been feeling in Calgary thanks to many years of phenomenal growth in this city, even despite the recent economic downturn in the community.”
Of the four, two are elementary schools with capacity for 600 students each in two neighbourhoods that have seen the greatest growth. Students in kindergarten through to Grade 5 in Martindale will attend Manmeet Singh Bhullar School, named for the Alberta MLA killed in 2015 while helping a driver on the QEII Highway.
Ron Southern School, named after the ATCO and Spruce Meadows founder, will open to kindergarten-to-Grade 6 students in the southwest area of Silverado. The school was slated to open in September, but delays have pushed back the launch. Students slated to attend the school will instead go to Braeside School until the new facility is ready for them.
Marshall Springs School in Evergreen is a middle school that will also see some elementary student overlap, teaching students from grades 4 to 9 with 900 new spaces. Students in Springbank Hill and Discovery Ridge will have the new Griffiths Woods School, a kindergarten-to- Grade 9 facility with capacity for 900 students, come online Jan 1. Students will attend their former schools — Battalion Park, Jennie Elliott, A.E. Cross or Bishop Pinkham — until the new school is ready in the new year.
Provincial government funding for schools had not been available for a number of years, even as the population in Calgary was surging and demands were high for school spaces, says Breton.
The addition of the four new facilities — with more slated to open in 2018 and the coming years — means students will have schools in their own neighbourhoods.
“What’s really exciting for many students is they will be able to walk to school at long last,” he says.
Calgary Catholic School District has three new schools opening this fall, which will help with the roughly 1,300 to 1,500 new students that enrol each year. Last September, the district opened four new schools, three of which were in the city’s burgeoning southeast quadrant. This fall, Guardian Angel, a kindergarten-to-Grade 6 school in Aspen Woods, the kindergarten-to-Grade-9 Apostles of Jesus in Skyview Ranch and Holy Child, a kindergarten-to-Grade-9 school in Silverado, will welcome students for the first time. Holy Child will operate as a K-8 school this year before adding Grade 9 students next year.
The openings come at the end of a roughly three-year construction period, and the facilities combined will make room for some 2,500 students, says spokeswoman Karen Ryhorchuk.
“It’s exciting because a school is not just for students, it’s a community hub. Whenever a new school opens in a community, it’s exciting for us — the district.”
Meanwhile, students in Rockyview School Division will have two new schools and one addition opening this fall in Cochrane and Airdrie.
Those communities, along with Chestermere, have seen such a high rate of growth that the additional facilities are greatly needed, says Rockyview’s director of facility planning Colette Winter.
In Airdrie alone, about 600 new students are attending schools each year.
“That’s almost a school a year,” says Winter.
The need for space will be eased with the addition of Fire side School (November 2017) in Cochrane and Windsong Heights School in Airdrie, both of which will start as kindergarten-to-Grade 7 facilities and then move to include Grade 8 students, along with the expansion of Herons Crossing School in Airdrie, a kindergarten-to-Grade 4 that will double in size with the new addition.
“We are growing by about a thousand kids every year, just in Rockyview schools,” says Winter. “Some of (that pressure) will be alleviated, but, because we are growing by such an amount, we continue to need new schools.”
As districts prepare for students to attend the brand new facilities, officials are already looking to 2018 and beyond.
The government has approved another Rockyview school facility for 2019, while Calgary Catholic has three additional schools set to open next year, including an essential high school.
“They aren’t built as often as an elementary or junior high,” says Ryhorchuk. “The last time we had a high school built was Notre Dame (High School) in 2005.”
The CBE also has new facilities coming online in 2018, but Breton is looking even further into the future, praising the provincial government’s spring approval of three more elementary schools.
“That is essentially where we would prefer to be — where the government is continuing to monitor growth across the province and fund schools in a timely fashion as opposed to a place where there is a large pent-up demand, and deliver all those schools at once, and have all those schools age at once,” says Ryhorchuk. “This will spread out the life-cycle costs.”