The former Gladstone elementary in College Heights will be the home of the Highglen Montessori program as soon as next Monday.
School District 57 officials hope Gladstone will be ready to house the 250 displaced students by next week.
The Montessori program is being moved to Gladstone until the school district decides to repair or replace Highhglen, which was damaged by a fire Monday afternoon. The school is closed and students will be off until Gladstone is ready to open.
Highglen parents will receive more information at a meeting Thursday at 5 p.m. at PGSS.
"I know any school fire would be sad, but the programming we have at this one, being a Montessori school, is a model of togetherness. It has that difference," said Tracy Summerville, chair of the Prince George Montessori Education Society. "Students at Highglen work across age groups, they are very interconnected. The older children are already concerned about their peers, especially the younger ones. We feel the one most critical thing is to remain together for the final couple of months."
One firefighter received "a minor knee injury" according to fire chief John Lane, but that was the only human casualty in the incident. There were others who were put in distress, however, and not all of them survived.
"Needless to say the children are devastated and everyone is still processing the loss of many of our beloved class pets," said Erin Smith, chair of the school's parent advisory council. However, it was noted that many of the pets did survive the ordeal and are now being fostered out to temporary families.
Lane said the pet's lives were saved largely by the swift, effective action taken by the on-scene firefighters. Nineteen personnel and five apparatus from all four municipal halls responded to the alarm, which came in at about 3:35 p.m. The flames succumbed to the direct spray of water the crews were able to apply, so it was extinguished relatively effectively. The flames did not spread past the northwest corner of the building where they found it upon arrival.
Smoke, however, was another matter. The toxic vapors permeated the entire structure, said Lane.
It is not yet known how much long-term damage that created, nor how much of an overall loss the flame-damaged sector of the building will calculate out to.
The primary goal now, said Lane, is to determine a cause.
"Our investigators continue to sort through the evidence that's available," he said, and the BC Safety Authority is sending in an investigator specializing in electrical components. "We have, we think, established a general area of origin but it is still too premature to discuss that yet."
The structural integrity of the remainder of the building was sound enough that investigators were safe to begin their detective work soon after the fire was deemed out. An excavator was needed but only to open up the rubble in the northwest corner where the flames were.
A teachers' meeting was happening at the time the fire broke out. Some of the children of those teachers were in the building, as well, and an after-school childcare program had many other kids on-site as well. All made their way safely outside when the alarms sounded.
A spokesperson for the Ministry of Education in Victoria said the ministry did not keep track of how many schools in the province have been damaged by fire, but that it was rare. One of the firefighters remarked to Lane that as a child he, too, was displaced by a school fire when Connaught school burned down and now he is involved in Highglen's investigation, but Lane was unaware of any others in the decades since then.
"For good reason," Lane said. "They are generally very safe places, which is what we expect for our children."
Summerville said that safety is still a concern, but it is emotional kind now that the physical danger has passed. She said the counsellors dispatched to attend to the students and staff already have been exemplary and principal Karin Paterson was in full reorganization mode.
"We are 100 per cent behind her," Summerville said. "I feel really great that if we have to go through something like this, it is under her leadership."
This weekend was supposed to be a major fundraising event for the Montessori programs in the city (there is a high school component as well, at PGSS), but many of the items are made by the students and were destroyed in the fire.
Summerville said that the community response has been large already but the needs are not immediate. She asked the public to store their concerns and, when plans can be set in motion, to bring that support forward when fundraising and resource-raising efforts can be held.
