AMDSB projects significant growth for several North Perth schools

As the Avon Maitland District school board begins a new boundary review in North Perth, it’s urging the parents and guardians of students enrolled at the impacted schools to get involved with the process.

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Board officials are aiming to have three representatives from each school be a part of the North Perth Boundary Review committee (NPBRC). This committee will meet three times in the coming months – with dates set for Jan. 9, Feb. 20 and April 3 – to work with the consulting firm the board has hired to help develop possible scenarios that will look to ease enrollment pressures, which will then be presented to the broader community. The possible solutions and community feedback will then be presented to trustees in the spring.

“At this point, we’re really trying to get the word out there about this so that we can get volunteers for our committee,” superintendent of corporate services Cheri Carter said.

“That’s kind of our big push right now is we need each school in the review area to have between one of three, but we would like three for each.”

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There are several schools that are being looked at as part of the review, including:

• Elma Township public school;
• Howick Central public school;
• Listowel District secondary school;
• Listowel Eastdale public school;
• Mornington central school;
• Milton public school;
• North Perth Westfield elementary school; and
• North Woods elementary school.

These schools range in where they are capacity-wise, with North Perth Westfield currently at 115 per cent, followed by Mornington at 92 per cent and then Howick and Milverton tied for third at 82 per cent. North Woods has the lowest rank at 68 per cent. These capacity percentages do not include portable ones that are on school property.

While Carter said that the Ministry of Education builds schools for existing need and not potential growth, North Perth Westfield – the newest school in the area – has been almost at capacity since it was built.

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“One of the things that most people don’t realize is obviously we, as a school board, don’t really have a lot of latitude to build whatever size building we want. So when we built the school, we had projections that it was going to continue to grow, (but) not to this extent. The enrollment growth we’ve seen since COVID has been really high. . . . When we built the school, it was already basically full, and we had laptops on right away, which is pretty typical,” Carter said.

The school board projects what enrollment at each of its schools is expected to be in three-, five- and 10-year periods. According to the report presented to trustees last week, Listowel Eastdale public school, Mornington central school, North Perth Westfield elementary school and Listowel District secondary school are projected to experience significant enrollment increases in the next 10 years.

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At the current rate – and if nothing changes in the next decade:

• North Perth Westfield is expected to have 1,070 students441 more than its 629 capacity
• Mornington will have 261 students, 62 more than its 199 capacity
• Listowel Eastdale will have 548 students.102 more than its 446 capacity; and
• Listowel District secondary school will have 1,262 students, 62 more than its 1,200 capacity.

While capacity percentage is a ministry measure, it doesn’t take into account things like class sizes or dedicated rooms for programs, Carter noted.

“Say you have a French classroom, or a music classroom, and now in many of these schools, because they’re at capacity, they don’t have the luxury of having a dedicated classroom for French. A lot of times the teacher goes to class to class to deliver the program but, from a school perspective, that feels fuller than it should be,” she said.

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The board will continue to allow border crossings as long as the requested school has the capacity to take students from outside its enrollment area, Carter said.

“Border crossing is something we’ve tried to allow in our district. People ask for border crossing for tons of different reasons. Child care is a big one. . . maybe there’s a friend group, or maybe there’s a comfort level with a smaller school, like, any number of reasons. We try to allow it, but then you get into an enrollment pressure school and it definitely impacts the pressure,” she added

While this is the board’s second recent boundary review after making changes in Stratford at the start of this school year, there are differences between the two processes, Carter said. Since Stratford has a number of schools at varying capacity levels, the boundary changes were a little easier to accomplish. North Perth, on the other hand, is growing rapidly but doesn’t have a similar number of schools to accommodate that growth.

“So we literally could just change a boundary and fix the problem (in Stratford). With North Perth, it’s not so clean,” Carter said.

“HASll of our in-town schools are full or will be full very shortly, and over capacity. And our neighboring schools out in the country. . . are also growing a little bit too. So it’s not that we have schools sitting at 50 per cent that we can just say, ‘Oh, this is easy. We’ll just move them over here.’ It’s not like that at all in North Perth.”

To find more information on the boundary review, or to become involved with the committee, visit amdsb.ca.

[email protected]

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