School was an ordeal for Maggie Slessor last year.
The Grade 11 student has cerebral palsy and usually gets around with a wheelchair. That was a problem at St. Gabriel High School, as it was on the second floor of a building and didn’t have an elevator – she had to climb the stairs using a walker with her mother Doreen's help. Once there, without the wheelchair's support, she would become exhausted in less than an hour.
All that changed in September when the school reopened in its new wheelchair-accessible location at the Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools district office building on St. Vital Ave.
Doreen said her daughter is now enthusiastic about school and doing better than ever at it.
“Now Maggie’s 100 per cent independent. I just drop her off at the front and I leave her and pick her up when she’s done.”
Maggie was one of about 14 guests who were at the GSACRD district office building Nov. 20 for the grand reopening of the St. Gabriel Education Centre. (She also got to cut the ribbon.)
St. Gabriel was for many years based out of a second-floor storefront in the Mission Hill Plaza mall on St. Albert Trail.
In 2019, GSACRD board members proposed to move the school to École Marie Poburan as part of a complex plan dubbed Faith in Our Future. The board dropped the idea last December in the face of public opposition. Instead, the board voted in May to do a $80,000 renovation of the district office building’s basement to turn it into a new home for the renamed St. Gabriel school.
Distance learning centre
St. Gabriel is technically home to about 620 students, maybe 10 of which are on site on any given day, said principal Evan Holstein.
About 95 are Outreach students – full-time high-schoolers who for various reasons chose not to attend a traditional high school. Another 25 take individual courses from anywhere in the province as distance learners. New this year are about 500 K-to-9 students enrolled in the district’s online school, which is for students unable or uncomfortable with attending in-person classes during the pandemic.
Outreach and distance learning students typically come in a few times a week for seminars or one-on-one talks with a teacher and do the rest of their work online, Holstein said. The online school students learn exclusively from home, guided by about 17 teachers who vid-cast from various schools and homes.
Holstein said it is great to have support from senior administrators available literally upstairs from his office. The new school’s small size also lets teachers really get to know their students.
“It’s hard to go unnoticed in a space like this,” he said.
Maggie said St. Gabriel’s flexible schedule is important for her, as cerebral palsy makes it tough to predict when she would have the stamina needed to learn. She is also a big fan of the school’s new wheelchair lift, which she uses dozens of times a day when she is on site.
In an emotional address to the crowd, Maggie said she felt so supported by her teachers at St. Gabriel that she now hopes to become an educator herself. She thanked the district for authorizing the school’s move.
“It’s because of this changed building that I’m allowed to be independent and (that) there are no barriers to me getting a proper education.”
Visit www.stgabe.gsacrd.ab.ca for more details on St. Gabriel school.
