District concerned with overcrowding at Moncton High School

In just a few weeks more than 1,000 students will be walking through these doors at Moncton High School and the district is now scrambling to make sure they are not walking into an overcrowded school in the middle of a pandemic.

“In order to comfortably accommodate everybody, we would have to create more space,” said Stephanie Patterson, the Anglophone East School District’s director of communications.

Moncton High School can only accommodate 1,250 students and more than 1,300 are registered for September, said Patterson.

She said that the school was at capacity last year but it was manageable due to at-home learning.

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“Only half of the student body was attending every day last year so there was less flow of people in the building,” she said.

But with high school students returning to full-time this year, she said that this week the Anglophone East School District sent a letter home to parents whose children went to Edith Cavell School and are slated to enter grade 9 at Moncton High if they would consider switching to Bernice MacNaughton High School.

“Which has fewer students and they would be able to get transportation,” said Patterson.

If there are not enough takers, the school may have to send out of bounds students to their original schools and portables may have to be brought in to accommodate the overflow so classes will not be overcrowded, said Patterson.

But even if 50 students do make a transfer, common areas may present an overcrowding challenge, “it would be a concern that there would be tons of people but we do anticipate that we will see some people choose to go to Bernice MacNaughton it might be more convenient for some people,” she said.

Global News reached out to the New Brunswick Teachers Association to find out if teachers are concerned with potential overcrowding at the school, but no one was available for comment.

The district says it is looking into consulting with the District Education Council and with the province to potentially change school boundaries for next year which haven’t been updated since Moncton High School was moved from downtown to the outskirts of the city.