The new school year is just around the corner.
With every school year, student’s worlds are supposed to get a little larger.
However, in Airdrie, thanks to a growing classroom space crisis, you can bet that worlds will seem to shrink for the forseeable future.
Despite assurances from the Minister of Education himself, who came to Airdrie May 4, there have been no announcements of new schools for the city over the past three months.
Students may have had the summer off, but parents have been busy organizing a campaign to pressure the Province to finally face the crisis and school administrators have been busy trying to figure out how to fit hundreds of new students into schools already bursting at the seams.
This week, Airdrie’s Chamber of Commerce also joined the effort, asking its member businesses to write letters to government officials to address the situation.
With every month that goes by with no help from the Province, the situation grows increasingly grim. With the arrival of this school year, the crisis will no longer be a looming threat. Despite local officials best efforts to warn the Province, the class space crunch has arrived in Airdrie.
According to Rocky View Schools, by 2014 there will be an additional 3,171 students division-wide. Last year, five schools in Airdrie were at 95 per cent utilization or more, with George McDougall High School at 102.9 per cent. The year will be worse, and even if a new school was announced today, it would take three-to-four years to become operational.
The summer of Airdrie’s discontent is coming to an end. Unless the Province comes to the people with some sort of remedy, a long, cold winter is on the way for an increasingly despised government.
