Board votes to keep Jr. High at Sister Annata Brockman school

The Edmonton Catholic School Board says it has found the space to keep the junior high program at a west Edmonton school open.

The board was faced with relocating students from Sister Annata Brockman because of extreme overcrowding.

The two year old school was built to handle 600 kids but school officials expect 800 to register in September.

The school needed 6 mobile classrooms to handle the overload or else the school board was going to bus the junior high students to a nearby school, which outraged many parents.

At a special meeting Friday morning, Board Chair Debbie Engel received a letter from Education Minister Thomas Lucaszuk informing the board it was approved for three of the classrooms to be relocated to Sister Annata Brockman.

The Minister also suggested the board use its Capital Reserves to build the remaining classrooms, which the board voted to do.

“This has been a roller coaster ride,” Engel told reporters after the meeting, “What I’m pleased about is that we have a decision for the community and it is what the community wanted.”

Those three classrooms will cost up to $1.5 million.

“This is not ideal,” says Engel, “we need our capital reserves to keep our non-operational schools up and running. We need it for emergency situations. We do not want this to be precedent setting because we don’t have extra money.”

Parents fighting the move were emotional after the decision.

“Thank goodness for our school board,” says one of the parents, Tammy Berge, “and for proving that they are going to stand behind our children.”

The Education Minister defended the decision to put some of the cost on the board saying the ECSB has a surplus and it’s all taxpayers’ money.

“I think taxpayers expect that their money be spent on education and not kept in a savings account while I have to use additional taxpayer money to pay for these portables,” Lukaszuk says.

With files from Ross Neitz