Parents sign open letter calling for action on overcrowded Moncton school

Schools across Moncton are bursting at the seams due to increased migration to Canada’s fastest-growing city.

St-Henri school, a francophone elementary school located near the city centre, is the most overcrowded school in the Francophone South District.

Thirty-five parents and counting have signed an open letter addressed to both the Department of Education and the Department of Transportation and Infrastructure, imploring them to make infrastructure changes to the school.

Claire Johnson, a parent of two St-Henri students, wrote the letter because she says some parents were concerned about the use of mobile classrooms.

“We really felt strongly that we needed new assessments and most likely need extra resources to deal with the influx of students that we’ve seen in the last year,” she said.

Her son, a Grade 3 student at St-Henri, attends class in one of the four new portable classrooms installed this year.

She said he didn’t mind it at first, but she questions if that will change as the winter months approach.

“Sometimes he needs to change his jacket or put on his shoes to go inside the school to use the bathroom,” she said.

“But when winter comes that’s actually gonna be an important barrier and it might be quite challenging for them.”

Beyond the infrastructure challenges, she’s concerned about how the overcrowded environment could impact student learning.

“I’m just more concerned about the overall management of the classroom and how the overall learning might be impacted because these new students need to be integrated,” she said.

Francophone South District Education Council President Michel Côté said the school, as well as many others in the district, were facing a shortage of classrooms.

“We had to change the cafeteria into classrooms, we added portable classrooms,” he said.

He said newly-constructed Claudette-Bradshaw school, which opened its doors in September, was already nearing maximum capacity.

“If we look at our school district altogether, if we don’t do anything, right now, it’s gonna be 40 portable classes we will need within the next five years,” he said.

He said St-Henri school has been on the Department of Education’s list to be expanded or rebuilt for years, and there was no indication when or if that would happen.

In a written statement sent to Global News on Friday, a spokesperson for the department said that St-Henri school was “high on their Stable Departmental Infrastructure Priorities list”.

“The list is a locked-in list of projects that are expected to begin within the next five years. Projects are completed in order as funding is made available,” the statement read.

They also said that a capital budget announcement “will be made within the coming months.”