Starting next year Duchess Park secondary school will only accept students within the school's catchment area.
School District 57's board passed the motion Tuesday night as a solution to overcrowding in the high school. It was a move away from recommendations in a 2015 facilities report, which suggested moving the French Immersion program and making Edgewood Elementary feed into Kelly Road's catchment instead.
"If we tighten up our policy on catchment then we don't have to worry about changing boundaries for Edgewood and things like that," said chair Tony Cable, pointing to new numbers presented to the board.
A report showed that 235 kids are enrolled in the downtown school who don't live in the area, making up almost a quarter of the 1,021 in the halls. That puts the school at 113 per cent capacity, when it's supposed to have 900 students.
"If we put a stop to that, then that'll help us with our French immersion program and also accommodating all of our in-catchment kids," said Cable, adding the current students will stay.
For parents with out-of-catchments children who want to keep siblings together, the board will follow the district's policy, but that doesn't mean they'll stay together.
"There's no guarantees," said Cable. "They would be looked at and if we could accommodate them we certainly would."
At the start of this year, several parents learned their children wouldn't go to school together, prompting them to voice frustrations about how the district had handled communicating its catchment policy.
The motion offered projections for enrolment, predicting by 2021 only students within Duchess Park's boundaries would be in the school.
The French immersion numbers are expected to continue to climb, with 269 registered this year, and 321 expected by 2021. By then the school should have dipped below capacity, with about 797 students or 89 per cent full.
The recommendation before the board from superintendent Marilyn Marquis-Forster and secretary treasurer Allan Reed, said they consulted with parent advisory councils and affected schools and that input was considered at an Oct. 3 education services committee meeting.
The board also decided not to combine or co-locate McBride secondary and elementary schools, in large part because it learned it would cost up to $2 million to upgrade the high school to accommodate the new students.
Reid spoke with a regional director for the Ministry of Education and learned it was unlikely to receive capital funding to retrofit the school. The motion also noted both school operated on a surplus and each plays a prominent role in the community. It said based on input, the financial position and the cost, "there is no compelling educational or financial reason to continue the consideration of co-locating the schools."
That option won't be considered until total kindergarten to Grade 12 enrolment is less than 150 students. And, Cable said Reid suggested that wasn't likely to happen for another four years.
"There's going to be some suggestion that the school district works hard on a campaign to encourage a number of students attending independent schools to come back to the public system," he added.
Cable said the district still has "a lot of work to do" on the last motion, which looked at moving Grade 7 students at Mackenzie's Morefee Elementary to the high school.
"There is without a doubt a number of concerns about that," said Cable, so it will need to consult with parents, especially because many would prefer their children stay at that age in an elementary.
A motion passed to have the superintendent and principals at each school "consider" a middle years education program. The earliest that would start is the 2017-18 school year.
