Transfer policy puts independent schools in a bind

Parents of students at independent schools are raising alarm bells over the school board's new catchment area and transfer policy, saying a lack of consideration has place them at the bottom of the enrollment priority list.

It's an issue for Sandy Ramsay. Even though the family lives near D.P. Todd, she worries her son will end up at College Heights or Kelly Road Secondary School once he graduates from St. Mary's Catholic School this year.

"Who's got time to drive all the way out there and pick them up every day?" she said.

Heidi Evanson, an Immaculate Conception parent, brought the issue to school board trustees' attention Tuesday night. Her son hopes to move onto College Heights Secondary School, which is in the family's neighbourhood, after completing Grade 7 but the new policy puts him in a bind.

"Because he goes to Immaculate Conception school, he's considered a non-school district child and to me that doesn't seem rational," Evanson told trustees.

She said independent school parents pay the same amount of taxes for the public system as everyone else and there are no major differences in the curriculum.

School board chair Lyn Hall said he's been made well aware of the situation, noting he's received a phone call from an independent school principal and a letter from the superintendent of the Catholic school system in Prince George.

"When we took at look at [the policy], it was around the impacts the policy has for our 13,500 students and I'm only going to speak for myself, I don't think we fully understood the ramifications that it had for other students that wanted to come in at the Grade 8 level from the private system," Hall said Tuesday night.

Trustees agreed to take a second look at the policy.

Ramsay said the independents should be assigned a "feeder school" in the public system. D.P. Todd is the neighbourhood school for her family but there's long been an unwritten rule that the St. Mary's students move on to Duchess Park.

"I would like to see these kids stay together as much as possible," Ramsay said. "I think it gives them comfort in going to this whole transition of going to a public system and then a high school system and having some familiar faces with them."

She's bracing herself for Prince George Secondary School despite attaining seventh place on the waiting list for Duchess.

"The school's way too big," she said. "These kids are used to intimate setting where they know everyone in the school."

The situation has only added to the stress of not only moving up into high school but switching to the public system, said Ramsay.

"You have no idea."