School board wants Mackay building
Would serve the deaf and visually impaired
The English Montreal School Board is hoping to acquire the Mackay Centre building on Décarie Blvd. for two of its specialized schools facing relocation.
In a bombshell announcement last June, parents learned that the Mackay Centre School for deaf and disabled students and the Philip E. Layton School for visually impaired students needed to find a new home.
The two EMSB schools are currently housed in separate facilities owned by the Mab-mackay Rehabilitation Centre, which plans to consolidate its clinical operations at one site.
The Mab-mackay also believes that a school, not a rehab facility, is the proper place to educate children.
The school board told parents in March that it had been making representations at every level of government – with the support of an assistant deputy minister of education – “to advocate for the purchase of the Mackay building.”
Parents are cautiously optimistic things are moving in the right direction, said Cristobal Vignal, chairperson of the governing board at the Mackay Centre School.
“We still have some concerns. ... It’s on the right track but it’s not over,” Vignal said.
Parents want assurances that the children will be properly housed and believe the best option is for them to stay in the Mackay building, he said. “This is a facility that was initially conceived and designed for this special needs population.”
Parents with children at Philip E. Layton on Sherbrooke St. W. also favour the Mackay location, according to Vignal, who noted how “incredibly cramped” the school is at its current site. The Education Department asked the EMSB to prepare a business case.
That work involved determining the cost of building a facility to house both schools and comparing it with buying the Mackay facility, factoring in any renovations needed to bring in students from Philip E. Layton, said Robert Stocker, the board’s director-general.
Stocker recently sent the file to the government and said it is looking at the estimates for building a new facility, which is about $33 million excluding the land, versus the acquisition of the Mackay building plus renovations.
While it doesn’t know what it would cost to buy the Mackay facility because it hasn’t formally approached the Mab-mackay centre, the board believes it would be anywhere from $10 million to $18 million, Stocker said. The estimate for adapting the facility to accommodate Philip E. Layton’s students is $6.5 million.
“We understand that if there are two alternatives, that (the government) would probably choose the least costly one,” he said.
Stocker said “pragmatically” the board hopes the Education Department agrees to acquire the Mackay Centre for the EMSB.
His understanding is that government department requests are sent to the Treasury Board, which usually announces details of its fiveyear plan in February or March, Stocker said. He’d like to have an answer by then so the EMSB can move ahead with talks to acquire the building and plan renovations, Stocker said.
If the project gets incorporated into the government’s five-year rolling plan, nothing guarantees the money will be freed up in the first year, Vignal said.
“We are concerned. If we don’t keep pressure, it’s something that could take five years,” Vignal said. “We’d like it to take one or two or as little as possible.”
A spokesperson for the Education Department would only say on Wednesday the file is being analyzed.