CALGARY -- The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) has turned to parents in an effort to balance enrolment and find solutions at new high schools that are already overcrowded.
The board is holding a series of public meetings to gain feedback. The first meeting took place Tuesday night at Lord Beaverbrook High School.
"We have four factors we’re anticipating our stakeholders will be conversing about," said Carrie Edwards with the CBE. "That includes grade configurations, boundaries, locations of programs as well as growth or reduction of alternative programs."
Some schools like Joanne Cardinal-Schubert High School are already feeling the pinch of over-enrolment.
The school opened just one year ago in Seton with a capacity of 1,811 students, but now has 1,893 enrolled.
The CBE says this year it has a number of high schools over provincial capacity and several classes are occurring in open area teaching spaces at the Seton school.
Classes being held in the hallways of school is concerning for students, but also parents.
Hilary Smashnuck will send her daughter to Grade 10 next year. Her home sits near the boundaries of Lord Beaverbrook and Joanne Cardinal-Schubert and questions still remain if boundaries will be changed.
"We live in the Douglasdale, McKenzie and Quarry Park areas where the boundaries cross," said Smashnuck said. "There’s an awful lot of kids there that don’t know where they’ll be going, whether they’ll be with their friends or whether the bussing is going to be convenient. There’s a lot of factors now that we didn’t know we’d have to deal with.”
The CBE plans to hold 11 more public feedback sessions over the course of the next month, most of which have already been fully booked. As a result of such high interest in public feedback, parents are now invited to participate in online sessions which will begin September 30.
Edwards says this will be a positive first step in balancing enrolment in the future. "We know we will need to look at all of the spaces across the city."
"We do have some underutilized school space and some schools that are over-utilized and what we need to look at is how we’re going to balance the enrolment over the next five to ten years."
The board admits there will be no quick fix and this process will take time. It anticipates decisions to balance enrolment will be made by October 2021, with implementation occurring in the 2022-2023 school year.
CBE adds that it is already projecting at least half of its high schools will be operating between 100 to 150 per cent capacity within the next five years.
