Bursting at the seams, CSDM adds mobile classrooms

A surge in enrolment has the Commission scolaire de Montréal vaunting the benefits of mobile elementary school classrooms.

The school board, which is the largest in the province, has received 3,500 new students in the past three years, the result of demographics, a spate of residential construction on the island and immigration, it says in a newsletter sent to parents on Friday.

Since September alone, the school board has welcomed 1,250 new students, it says.

The newsletter, signed by CSDM chairperson Catherine Harel Bourdon, says the school board has already converted art and music rooms and afterschool daycare facilities into classrooms inside its schools to accommodate the overflow without having to send pupils to attend school outside their neighbourhood.

TEMPORARY FIX

Now, the CSDM has also begun adding prefabricated portable classrooms as a temporary fix while it awaits construction of new schools.

The board has already installed mobile prefab classrooms at Judith-Jasmin elementary school in Notre-Dame-de- Grâce.

“This temporary situation is not ideal, we agree,” the newsletter says. “However, it is, for us, the best solution to ensure as much as possible that your children are schooled in your neighbourhood.”

The school board plans to install more portable prefab classrooms at “several schools starting with the next back-to-school” in the fall, it adds.

The CSDM also notes that prefab construction has greatly improved over the years, and that the units respect the same quality standards in terms of insulation, ventilation and light as houses.

At the same time, the CSDM has begun recovering school buildings that were emptied and leased out so they can once again be put to use as schools, the newsletter says. The school board has also been taking advantage of its program to upgrade existing school buildings by making renovations to increase capacity at the same time, it says.

The newsletter calls the portable classrooms a “short-term solution.”

It says that with the Education Department anticipating 6,800 more students will be added to the board’s school population in the coming years, it will require 15 new schools to be built to accommodate 450 students each over the next five years.

The Education Department’s projection doesn’t take into account future residential development projects and any future influx of immigrants, the newsletter adds.

Harel Bourdon ends the newsletter by pledging to update parents on the situation at elementary schools during back-to-school this fall.