Elisabeth Veeken and Lynne Thanos have a problem.
The two mothers are both in a situation where an older child is attending Duchess Park secondary school, but there is no room at the school for the younger sibling heading into Grade 8. They are on a waitlist but unless something changes, their kids will be forced to attend separate high schools.
Veeken wants her son, who is first on the waitlist to get into Duchess Park, to join his older sister already at the school.
He attended St. Mary's Catholic school last year (full disclosure: my daughter attended
St. Mary's from 2003 through 2009, before going to high school at College Heights secondary). Complicating matters, Veeken does not want her boy to attend his catchment area high school, Kelly Road secondary school, because the bullies who have tormented her son go to that school.
Thanos also had her son attend St. Mary's and her preference was for him to join most of his classmates moving on to Duchess Park, where most Grade 7 St. Mary's graduates go for high school.
The problem is St. Mary's is a private school and is not officially a feeder school to Duchess Park, meaning the students of the official feeder schools - the other public elementary schools in the area - get first dibs on the spots. The nice, modern school and the popularity of the French immersion program make Duchess Park a preferred destination for many students and their parents. As a result, the new Duchess Park has been over capacity almost from the day it opened its doors in 2010.
The waitlist to get into Duchess Park this fall is more than 40 kids and the problem is expected to get worse. By 2023, the school is expected to be at 128 per cent capacity.
All parents of school-aged children can sympathize with the challenges of shuttling children to two (or more) schools at the same time. On the surface, the issue brought forward by Veeken and Thanos doesn't look like it's School District 57's problem, yet it is. Not only is it a problem the school board created, the trustees refuse to implement the solution they paid a consultant to recommend.
French immersion has taken off in Prince George. As the school board heard at their first meeting of the year earlier this month, there are 1,044 French immersion students in the school district, making up eight per cent of the entire student population. A decade ago, just four per cent of students in this school district were in French immersion.
Cascades Facilities Management completed a long range facilities plan for the school district in early 2015.
In that report, the very first recommendation made by the consultants was to move the high school French immersion program from Duchess Park to Prince George secondary because that one change solves several problems. It will reduce the overcapacity issues not only at Duchess Park but also at D.P. Todd secondary, since Duchess Park would now have the space to take the extra D.P. Todd students. Furthermore, PGSS is already well under capacity, with about 1,200 kids going to school in a building that can house 1,500. By 2023, the consultants predicted just 900 students will be going to PGSS while nearly 1,200 would be going to Duchess Park, a school built for 900.
Moving French immersion to PGSS seems like a simple, elegant solution to a complicated problem yet the school board won't budge. The trustees got an earful from the parents of French immersion kids who don't want to send their kids to PGSS and no doubt that has something to do with their unwillingness to change. As it stands now, school board chair Tony Cable even refuses to link the problem brought forward by Veeken and Thanos with the success of French immersion and the problems that success is causing, even though the connection seems obvious to anyone looking at the numbers.
Instead, the school board wants to look at a complex, unnecessary realignment of feeder schools to manage a problem the trustees created and insist on maintaining.
This is an opportunity for new superintendent Marilyn Marquis-Forster to review the facts, digest the Cascades report and then inform the board that dealing with the political fallout from angry parents is their problem and not her concern.
The best administrative move for School District 57 is to immediately move the French immersion program to PGSS.
-- Managing editor Neil Godbout
