Parents, heritage group react to Connaught closure

REGINA – Despite a lengthy fight, Regina’s historic Ecole Connaught Community School will be shutting its doors.

Connaught was about to fall apart, according to a February engineer’s report, but public school trustees made it official on Tuesday night at Connaught will close at the end of June.

Liberty Emkeit, a parent with two children attending Connaught, expressed her disappointment.

“This building is not just a building. It’s a part of our culture, our history,” Emkeit said. “Something this important needs to be preserved.”

Emkeit doesn’t live in the Cathedral neighbourhood, but wanted her kids to attend a school with Connaught’s 102-year history.

The Regina Board of Education decided renovation would be too costly, and it didn’t want to spend $67,000 to maintain the building for even one more year.

“There are significant structural concerns and foundational concerns with Connaught, which would lead us to a rebuild being the best option,” said Katherine Gagne, the board chair.

In February 2013, the school’s interior showed cracks and crumbling from classrooms down to the basement.

Money had been raised by community members to help fund repairs but now it’ll be spent on information requests and any future legal fees, as Save Our Connaught Heritage isn’t giving up.

“We’re going to fight for the school until they’re out there with bulldozers, and I’m sure there will be people laying in front of them,” said Rene Dumont, the group’s chair.

Most of the 300 students attending Connaught will be bused to Wascana Community School, just under three kilometres away.

Gagne says a new school will be built in Cathedral by 2017, but trustees haven’t decided exactly where: “When we have a new school built in the Cathedral area, it’ll be a place where families will gather and the community will call their own.”

Emkeit’s family won’t, though. The pending shutdown of Connaught helped them decide to move out of the city.

“With the closure of this building, it was sort of the last straw that helped me realize this is the right choice,” she said.