Academy Canada Prepares rural classrooms

Private college taking over adult basic education programs

Academy Canada director James Loder’s summer got a lot busier with the announcement this week it will expand to 11 new communities in Newfoundland and Labrador to deliver adult basic education.

“I was on holidays. I was expecting the announcement to come in one week, so I decided I would take the week before off,” he said. “It was Monday morning at 10 a.m., I was lounging around in my shorts on my deck.”

As reported earlier this week, independent career college Acade- my Canada will move beyond its existing campuses in St. John’s and Corner Brook and begin offering adult basic education in Baie Verte, Bonavista, Deer Lake, Happy ValleyGoose Bay, the Labrador coast (Nain and Hopedale), Labrador West, Northwest River, Placentia, Seal Cove/C.B.S. and St. Anthony. Work is already being done to get their new locations ready, said Loder.

“We’re going into new communities and we’ll be acquiring new space,” he said.

“We’ve got a number of them that have already been secured, and some of the campuses we already have physically set up with desks and chairs ready to go. In other areas, we’ve got the contracts in place and we’re just getting ready to set them up, and there’s others where we’re in the final negotiating stage with the landlord. But we have somewhere planned for all the locations.”

Some of the locations include spaces previously used by the College of the North Atlantic, said Loder. All of the locations need to be ready for when classes start Sept. 6.

He’s excited about the expansion, which he calls the “next natural step” for the company.

“It’s really good news for us. Our school has been around for almost 30 years. It’ll be 30 years next year,” he said. “We’ve delivered programs in St. John’s and Corner Brook, and we have done some communitybased training. We did a project in Roddickton, and we’ve done some courses in Sheshatshiu and Natuashish before, but we’ve never had a permanent presence in Newfoundland. So this allows us to expand and help support and build rural Newfoundland in a way we’ve wanted to do ( for) a long time.”

The amount of hiring needed to be done won’t be known until final enrolments are in, but he expects at least 30 instructors will be needed.