Rocky View County has identified a strong need for a new school in Crossfield.
While Rocky View Schools (RVS) has dealt with its urban schools at near-capacity for several years, local rural communities like Crossfield are feeling the pressure too. RVS said Crossfield is currently tenth on its priority list for overcrowding issues, but that number could be creeping up over the next few years as the local school population continues to climb.
While an official update on capacity numbers across RVS won’t be available until Sept. 30, the public school division’s director of communications, Tara de Weerd, provided some context of the current situation in Crossfield.
“RVS has identified the need for a new Kindergarten to Grade 8 (K-8) school in Crossfield with a capacity for 600 students in RVS’ 2024 - 2027 Capital Plan for 2025. It is number 10 on the list of RVS’ top priorities,” said de Weerd. “The pressures faced by many of our over-full schools will continue into the foreseeable future.”
The site for the new Crossfield school is shovel-ready, she added, but the RVS board of trustees will have to continue advocating to the provincial government to get capital funding released for all the new schools on its capital plan. Something which has proven difficult to date.
“Crossfield has a school site that meets all the criteria of construction,” confirmed RVS’ board chair Norma Lang. “With the utilization in Crossfield, especially at the W.G. Murdoch school, which is grades 6 to 12, reaching over 100 per cent fully-utilized last year, it makes it all the more important that we get the construction funding for the schools at the top of our list so we can start to think about a timeline to build another school in Crossfield.”
To get Crossfield to the top of the list, RVS first needs to see schools in the division's urban areas, which are at a higher critical level, built as quickly as possible.
Last year, the Government of Alberta approved funding in principle for the top four priorities for design, planning, and pre-planning, Lang added. With those out of the way, Crossfield would be prioritized as sixth on the division's list.
Even if a new Crossfield school was approved tomorrow, it would take three or four years from the time of announcement to when doors are opened for students, Lang said.
She added that won’t realistically happen, and the community will face an even greater space crunch for some time – as is currently being experienced in Airdrie, Cochrane, and Chestermere.
“The writing is on the wall for the community of Crossfield, and they can see it coming already – the day when there will be a lot more [modular classrooms] added to both schools to manage growth before the third school in Crossfield will be constructed, and is ready for students,” Lang said.
Currently, there are already quite a few modular classrooms attached to schools in Crossfield, with room for more.
Crossfield is largely seeing an increase in students from an influx of new residents moving to the community, Lang noted.
She anticipated the next pinch point among RSV’s rural communities will be Springbank, which may feel some pressure from additional students as a result of the new community of Harmony being built right now.
As of the RVS board meeting on Sept. 21, RVS had 28,586 students, which was 100 less than projected.
Airdrie is up 500 students compared to exactly one year ago, Chestermere and Langdon area were up about 200 students, Cochrane, Westbrook, and Bearspaw are up 300 students, Bragg Creek and Springbank area remained stable, Crossfield is up about 15 to 20 students, and Beiseker and Kathryn are up about 10 students as well.
That equates to about a 3.5 per cent growth from last year, said RSV superintendent, Greg Luterbach, or around 950 students.
“We are constantly and consistently growing by about 1,000 students a year,” Luterbach said.
In 2022/23, Crossfield Elementary was 79 per cent utilized and W.G. Murdoch was 98 per cent utilized, according to de Weerd. RVS’ overall utilization rate at all of its schools throughout the division in 2022/23 was 92 per cent, and without new schools, de Weerd said, this will rise to 101 per cent by 2025.
Official numbers for school utilization within the current school year will be released in October.
