No Grade 9 students registered at new school
The city’s new French Catholic school won’t have high school students when it opens in September after all - nobody signed up for Grade 9 this fall.
The new École Monseigneur-Jamot on Woodglade Blvd. is still under construction but is opening in September.
It was designed to be a school for French-speaking students from junior kindergarden to Grade 12.
It’s still going to have a high school, says one superintendant – just not right away.
Suzanne Iskander said Grade 9 will be introduced in September 2018 – a full year after the school opens. Then Grades 10, 11 and 12 will be added subsequently, one year at a time. That wasn’t the original plan, said Iskander, superintendent of education for the French Catholic school board (Conseil scolaire de district catholique Centre-Sud).
She said that the school was meant to have Grade 9 right away in September 2017.
The later grades were to be added over the next three years, as those initial Grade 9 students progressed through high school.
But nobody signed up for Grade 9 in the inaugural year, Iskander said – not even the Grade 8s who are about graduate from Monseigneur-Jamot’s current school on Romaine St.
She said there could be many reasons for that: students may have wanted to follow older siblings at other local high schools, for instance.
“For this community, this model (a school spanning JK to Grade 12) is still unfamiliar,” she said in French.
Iskander pointed out the Englishlanguage schools in Peterborough don’t have a JK-to-Grade 12 school.
She said the school board made an effort to attract Grade 9 students for September: they held open house meetings at the current Monseigneur-Jamot school, for example, and also ran newspaper ads.
French immersion students were welcome to apply.
There was market research done before the school was built, Iskander said – they looked at Peterborough’s French-speaking population, and decided there’s a need for a Frenchlanguage school into the future.
It may take four years for the school to have students all the way to Grade 12, she said, but she’s confident it will happen.
It’s going to mean the school will have plenty of extra space, in its early days: it’s built for 430 students, but will only have 200 in September. It will replace the current elementary-only Jamot school on Romaine St.