WATCH: Residents around the proposed new TCDSB school are concerned by the amount of traffic that the school is expected to bring.
TORONTO – The Toronto Catholic District School Board’s (TCDSB) plan to expropriate 30 townhouses in North York to build a new school has caused concern among more than just the residents who could be forced out of their homes.
Petitions collected by nearby residents concerned about traffic each have more than 300 signatures.
Jay Sobel spoke to Global News during the morning drop-off period outside Lester B. Pearson Elementary School on Thursday, near the proposed site of the new St. Joseph’s Morrow Park all-girls school at 500 Cummer Avenue.
Over a span of 20 minutes, the streets were filled with school buses, cars, students and their parents. Vehicles and pedestrians frequently came within a foot of contact, traffic was held up because only one car at a time could make it through the snowbank-narrowed throughfare and side streets were regularly used to make U- turns and three-point turns.
“I don’t see the traffic problem decreasing any time soon,” Sobel said, citing crowding and visibility concerns as he watches the drivers work their way around.
Pearson Elementary has over 500 students. Residents like Sobel worry that building another school nearby for over 800 students will only exacerbate the issue.
Sobel wrote a letter to Mayor John Tory urging him to “address these issues and right these wrongs, immediately; since no else will or has.”
He and many of his neighbours worry the city won’t heed their concerns until someone is killed.
Sobel said the TCDSB, which bought the land at 500 Cummer Avenue from the TDSB, should find somewhere else to go.
“I’m sure that the Catholic District School Board could find a property and a land and a school that could fit their needs at this moment.”
But the catholic board’s chair says that is much easier said than done. The new campus must accommodate the same community as the current one, and he claims the availability of large acreage for school facilities is quickly drying up.
“We’ve been told point blank, ‘we don’t want you here,'” says Mike Del Grande. “Those are pretty sad words…What would they rather have us do? Close all these sites and give them to condos?”
Del Grande said a lack of cooperation from the community left the catholic board no choice but to go with their current plan. He says that extends to the traffic situation too.
TCDSB staff say that to mitigate some of the traffic impact their initial proposal called for an exit from the property onto Algo Court, a small residential street to the west. The board says residents’ concerns led to the idea being scrapped and replaced with a right turn-only exit onto Bayview Avenue, necessitating the expropriation. A diagram for the so-called “Concept B” also shows an enter-only driveway from Cummer Avenue.
“You’re basically going the width of the field,” says Del Grande. “So you can accommodate a lot of cars that are in there as opposed to being backed up on (Cummer) Avenue.”
Following protocol, the board did a local traffic study and surveyed students at the current St. Joseph’s school. Staff say they believe the traffic impact will be further softened by the fact that a significant portion of those students say they take public transit to school.
But many locals don’t buy it, insisting there’s just no room for another big school in their neighbourhood.
“This area was not designed for the volume of traffic that they’re busing in,” says Sobel.
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