St. Albert and Morinville will need about six more schools this decade to accommodate their booming student populations, say local superintendents.
Sturgeon and St. Albert school boards will receive their official enrolment numbers starting next week.
St. Albert Public’s population grew by 5.5 per cent, said superintendent Barry Wowk, which is about the same amount it grew last year.
“We’re looking at 7,400 students right now,” Wowk said, or about 412 more than last year.
“It’s huge, huge.”
Most of this growth was in the kindergarten class, which set a new record at almost 600 students, Wowk said – the typical cadre is about 400.
Elmer S. Gish, which was already overcrowded as of last year, bore the brunt of this year’s expansion, adding about 136 students to its numbers, Wowk said.
“It presents a challenge, but overall, it’s very exciting.”
Much of this growth was due to the city’s rising population, Wowk said.
“You go drive in that Erin Ridge North and there’s just homes everywhere.”
Wowk said that in addition to the upcoming Lois Hole Elementary, the board would likely need a new K-to-9 school and a new high school in four years because of this growth.
St. Albert’s Catholic student population grew to about 4,500 this year, said Catholic board superintendent David Keohane – an increase of about 200 students. Its Morinville cadre held steady at 1,700.
The Catholic board’s biggest space crunch was at Morinville’s Notre Dame Elementary, Keohane said.
“It has more than 500 students,” he said, and will be maxed out at six portables as of this year.
The board’s top priority was to get a new school in Morinville as a result, he said. It also needed a new school in St. Albert’s northern Erin Ridge, but that was less pressing.
The Sturgeon School Division also needed another school in Morinville, said superintendent MichÄŤle Dick. Morinville Public hit about 550 students this fall – almost nine times what it had when it opened in 2011.
Principal Wayne Rufiange said the school is good for space for now, but they’ll need to find five more classrooms next year if the growth keeps up.
“Then we’re looking at not having a music room, an art room, a computer lab,” he said.
Dick said the district as a whole grew by about 1.9 per cent (94 students), which is pretty close to the amount it grew last year.
Enrolment numbers will be presented to board councils over the coming weeks.
Bertha Kennedy students will get a free party later this month for being the first school to win St. Albert’s Cultivating Front Yards contest.
The City of St. Albert announced the winners of its third-annual Cultivating Front Yards contest last Sept. 23. The annual event is meant to encourage residents to beautify the city through gardens.
This was the first year the city had a category for school gardens, said Joan Barber, the city’s manager of business retention and expansion. Judges wanted to see a school that not only had a great variety of plants in its garden but that could demonstrate how they incorporated the garden into their curriculum.
Bertha Kennedy Catholic Community School beat Muriel Martin and Albert Lacombe to become the inaugural winner in this category, Barber said.
This is the third year that Bertha Kennedy has grown a vegetable garden, said garden co-ordinator and teacher Dolores Andressen. Instead of an outdoor plot, the school uses mobile Earthboxes so it can start plants indoors and wheel them outside come spring.
Students from grades one to four help plant and care for the garden and learn how food grows in the process, she continued.
“They love to get their hands in the soil.”
The garden teaches students about organic food and healthy eating habits and produces a harvest soup each fall for the entire school, Andressen said.
“This year we planted just tomatoes, onions and peppers, so we’re either going to have a salsa day or we’re going to have a pasta day,” she said. Parents were chopping up the garden’s 150 pounds of tomatoes in preparation for the feast.
Bertha Kennedy students will get a party, a wrought-iron commemorative garden stick and a cheque for $250 presented by Mayor Nolan Crouse later this month for their win, Barber said.
Andressen said the school might use the cash to build a raised-bed garden, as it was tough to haul the Earthboxes outside each year.
