‘It’s very frustrating as a parent’: Rocky View School District faces a space crisis

Some of the communities surrounding Calgary have seen the biggest growth in all of Canada in recent years.

Cochrane and Airdrie are the only two Alberta communities that made the top 25 list with the highest rate of population growth between 2016 and 2021, but school construction isn’t keeping up.

The chair of the Rocky View School Division says they are facing a space crisis.

At 1,276 students, Bert Church High School in Airdrie, Alta., is operating at capacity.

In fact, out of the 53 schools within Rocky View Schools, 23 are at or over capacity.

Some, like Airdrie’s George McDougall High School, are so packed cafeteria space has been converted into classrooms.

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School enrolment utilization at George McDougall High School is at 102 per cent. Bert Church High School is at 99 per cent and W.H. Croxford High School in Airdrie is at 109 per cent utilization.

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“Definitely kids start to feel pretty crowded and parents don’t like it either,” said Norma Lang, chair of Rocky View School Division’s board of trustees.

Lang said they were expecting funding for at least a couple of the four desperately-needed capital projects they asked for.

Instead they got nothing for construction funding in the province’s 2023 budget.

“Our situation is desperate. By 2026, our school division will be over 100 per cent utilized, meaning that we will have more students than spaces in just a few short years,” Lang said.

Crossfield parent Chelsey Devauld said parents in Rocky View Schools have been advocating for new schools for years to meet the growing demands.

“It’s very frustrating as a parent because I use the analogy of a car wreck, but it’s actually a car wreck that we knew was coming,” Devauld said.

Alberta’s Education Minister Adriana LaGrange said her department has a “different process” this year: the department is allocating pre-planning, planning, design and construction dollars.

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A Kindergarten to Grade 8 school in Airdrie is listed by the province as “design funding,” a high school school in Airdrie is at the “school planning” stage, and schools in Cochrane and Chestermere are in the “pre-planning” stage.

“I think there was some ambiguity. Absolutely every one of those four schools will all be built when they are ready to be built, so it’s just a matter of looking through those different processes they have to go through,” LaGrange said on Thursday.

Rocky View Schools maintains the four new schools were not approved for construction funding.

Construction of 13 schools across the province — including in Calgary and Edmonton — will begin this year with full funding. A full list of schools receiving full construction funding can be found on the province’s website.

RVSD asked Alberta Education to approve and fund a Kindergarten to Grade 8 school in Airdrie, a Kindergarten to Grade 5 school in Cochrane, a Kindergarten to Grade 9 school in Chestermere and a high school in Airdrie as the top four critical priorities in their capital plan.

Lang said it takes about three years to build a new school after a division receives construction funding approval.  She said while receiving some design, planning and pre-planning funding offers some hope for new schools in the future, it pushes that space relief out for Airdrie high school students and Cochrane and Chestermere elementary students to five to six years or more.