The development of new communities in west Airdrie is proving to pose a challenge for the local public school division, according to a discussion at the May 12 Rocky View Schools (RVS) Board of Trustees meeting.
The upcoming Cobblestone Creek community, which will be developed in southwest Airdrie, is expecting to bring in approximately 600 new students to the RVS district. Taking up 157 acres of land, the community is anticipating 3,200 residents within the new neighbourhood.
Although construction of the homes is not expected to begin until later this year, the school district is already experiencing capacity concerns in many of its Airdrie schools, and accommodating the future influx of students could become a challenge.
The school district is not expecting to feel the full force of the new incoming students for a few years. Despite this, many of Airdrie’s public schools are already feeling capacity-related pressures, and incoming students will potentially pose an issue that will need time and money to address.
The closest schools to the new community are Nose Creek Elementary School, Windsong Heights School, and W.H. Croxford High School. However, the future students in Cobblestone Creek will likely be directed instead to A.E. Bowers Elementary School, École Airdrie Middle School, and George McDougall High School, although these schools are nearly twice as far away.
At the May 12 meeting, Superintendent of Schools Greg Luterbach said larger distances between home and school are not uncommon for Airdrie residents, as the school district continues to grapple with the city’s growing population and the available infrastructure.
“This is a growing school division and we are trying to accommodate kids not of where they naturally would go to school, but somewhere else,” said Ward 1 (Chestermere) Trustee Shali Baziuk. “This incurs other costs like transportation and also impacts the kids' ability to participate in extracurriculars.”
Superintendent Luterbach added the district is not in a situation to accommodate the projected future influx of Cobblestone Creek students in the schools closest to the future neighbourhood.
“We’re feeling space pressure in all the schools,” he said, adding the school district expects both A.E. Bowers and École Airdrie Middle School to accommodate the development growth for at least the short term.
However, high school accommodation within the district is another challenge.
“We know all our high schools are full,” Luterbach said, noting that currently, Bert Church High School is at over 100 per cent capacity of its utilization rate.
“I think of the impact when [I] visited all three Airdrie high schools, where [I] saw the reality of what the space crunch and high schools look like already at Rocky View,” Luterbach added.
Luterbach is hoping to host school tours with local MLAs and each of the ministers for education, infrastructure, finance, and municipal affairs to better demonstrate the limited space within the schools.
The RVS advocacy committee plans to participate in trade shows and community events, create infographics and videos, and network with politicians to further promote the issue regarding space in the division’s schools. By engaging with the community, Luterbach said the committee can highlight enrolment growth for students and provide accurate information to Airdrie residents.
In the future, “we hope that we’ll have a new high school,” Luterbach added. The RVS board expects the Cobblestone Creek community to house mostly elementary and middle school children, allowing the district time to build a new Airdrie high school by the time those students are older.
As a temporary solution, the school district relies on the installation of modular units – portable classrooms that allow for a quick and short-term solution to growing school enrolment. However, it was noted at the May 9 meeting that the district was recently denied provincial funding for the relocation of their current modular units, as board chair and Ward 6 trustee Fiona Gilbert shared earlier this month.
“The portables that give us breathing room that were approved and didn’t come and still aren’t in place last year, now the [Alberta] government has announced that there won’t be any modular allocations for this year,” Baziuk added.
That adds extra pressure to RVS to come up with creative solutions to the overcrowding problem being felt within some of its schools, like moving students to other schools farther from home.
Baziuk requested more action from the provincial government, saying that “there really needs to be an increase in the amount of infrastructure for school spending that is being announced by the province to make up for this shortfall because modular [units] for us … we really depend on that.”
Currently, RVS is moving its modular units from some schools to others, which Baziuk argued is like “robbing Peter to pay Paul.” The Chestermere trustee added that since the government has denied funding for modular units this year, “there should be a marked increase in how many schools are funded for next year.”
