Measures aim to ease overcrowding at KSS
A new French immersion program will be established at Okanagan Mission Secondary in September 2022 to ease overcrowding at Kelowna Secondary.
As well, foreign student enrolment at KSS will be capped at 65, also with a view to addressing the school’s capacity issues.
And Grade 9 students whose families live outside the KSS catchment area will only be allowed to enrol in Grade 10 at the school in the future if space permits. In practice, this means they will “most likely” have to attend the high school that is closest to them, Central Okanagan Public Schools said in a Thursday news release.
The series of decisions, months in the planning and based on a public consultation process, were approved by trustees at a Wednesday meeting.
With more than 1,900 students, KSS, located on Raymer Avenue behind Okanagan College, is at capacity.
In the release, the school district says the decisions will ease overcrowding at KSS for three or four years. But it says the “only viable long-term solution” is for the provincial government to fund construction of a new high school in the Glenmore area.
Such a capital project has been on the local board’s wish list for eight years, but has not been approved yet. If it is not funded and built by September 2025, district officials say, all three high schools in Kelowna will be over-capacity.