EDMONTON – Several west Edmonton parents are worried they will be forced to find a new school for their children due to enrolment pressure at their current school.
“I love the school, I love the teachers, I love the principal,” said Colleen Kellner. “The children love each other. They don’t want to be split up.”
Kellner has one child enrolled at Bessie Nichols School, which opened its doors in the west Edmonton community of The Hamptons in 2012. The Kindergarten to Grade 9 school has the capacity to hold 840 students. But due to the booming population in the area, there are already 830 students enrolled at the school this year.
“In the past three years, we’ve had an increase in over 6,600 students,” explained Superintendent Darrel Robertson. “And just last year we had a little over 3,000 students join Edmonton Public Schools.”
Edmonton Public Schools anticipates the enrolment at Bessie Nichols will only increase this September, so is looking at a number of options to keep the school at or below capacity.
The options include removing Glastonbury and Granville from the Bessie Nichols attendance area, which would reduce future enrolment. Another option would see Grade 8 and 9 students moved elsewhere, making Bessie Nichols a Kindergarten to Grade 7 school.
“The way that the options are written it seems like my kids are getting kicked out… I did not expect that,” said Stephanie Krebs, who lives in the Glastonbury neighbourhood and has two children who attend Bessie Nichols.
“It’s fine to re-designate the incoming kids, put a cap on the Kindergartens that are incoming, that’s fine,” she added. “But to have my kids moved… because there’s no room for them, I don’t think that’s fair.”
The board has asked the provincial government for 14 new schools, including one near Bessie Nichols. Two schools have been approved, set to open in 2016, but the board says tough decisions will need to be made for the upcoming school year.
“We want to make sure that our families are supported and we want to hear from them and we want to work with them, but decisions are going to have to be made because our pre-enrolment process will start at the beginning of March,” Robertson added.
Parents say they understand the pressure, but hope their children won’t be forced out of a school they’ve come to love.
“The kids are all together, they’re bused together, it’s more of a community for us,” said Krebs. “I want them to be here. We started off here, I think we have every right to be here.”
A public meeting will be held at Jasper Place School at 6:00 p.m. on Tuesday to discuss enrolment pressures at Bessie Nichols School.
Edmonton Public Schools is also taking feedback through an online survey on its website.
With files from Tom Vernon, Global News.
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