Catholic board looking for room, and capital funding, for growing Forest school

Enrollment is growing at St. John Fisher elementary school in Forest and school board officials hope provincial funding will allow the school building to grow along with it.

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A request to Ontario’s Ministry of Education last year for capital funding to expand the school wasn’t successful, but will be submitted again this year, said Amy Janssens, associate director with the St. Clair Catholic District school board.

“Given the space we have, we’re over our capacity,” she said.

The school, which has an official capacity of 282 pupils, has portable classrooms and is running at about 119 per cent.

“We’re showing growth up to about 126 per cent by 2026,” Janssens said.

“Right now, we’re taking care of that through the use of laptops but we’re asking the ministry to help us with some funding to potentially add on five classrooms,” she said.

“The hope is we would get rid of those portable.”

The board is asking the province for “just over $3.9 million” for the addition, Janssens said.

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Portable classrooms are “completely safe” but “you hope they are temporary,” she said. “In this case, we don’t see the situation reversing itself for us.”

The board also is asking the province for funding to buy additional land for the addition, and because the layout of the school property prevents placing laptops close to the building, she said.

Adding land would require reaching an agreement with a neighboring landowner, Janssens said.

“This application we’ve submitted to the ministry has two parts,” she said. “One would be let us build this five-classroom addition, which we would need the land for.”

The second option would be for the ministry to provide money to just buy land so the board “can at least move the mobiles into a better spot,” she said.

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“This school surprised us,” Janssens said about enrollment growth in Forest.

“But there’s new housing in the area and it seems to be where people are choosing to live.”

The board is seeing something similar in the Chatham-Kent community of Blenheim where it’s also seeking provincial funding for an addition to St. Anne school.

Another project included in the board’s recently updated long-term capital plan for which it is seeking provincial funding is to buy land and build a replacement for Ursuline College secondary school in Chatham.

“The ministry only has so much money to go around and, to be fully transparent, we submitted these three plans last year and we were declined for all three,” Janssens said.

If the ministry does provide funding “for at least one, we would be ecstatic,” she said.

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The capital plan also calls for investigating potential adjustments in how space is used at St. Patrick’s secondary school in Sarnia.

“St. Pat’s is generally at full capacity,” Janssens said. “However, there are lots of strategies you can use with the space that you have at a large secondary school.”

The board is looking into options of converting “under-utilized space” in the building to additional classroom space, she said.

“We see we have this really strong retention from Grade 8 to Grade 9 right now from our Catholic elementary schools,” so the board wants to ensure “we have the right amount of space at St. Pat’s when those students show up at our door ,” she said.

Renovations that began this year on Sarnia’s Hogan Drive, to prepare the former Gregory A. Hogan building to become the new home of Sacred Heart elementary school next September, are on schedule, Janssens said.

The $3.3-million project includes a larger gym and other improvements.

“Our hope is that they’re completed by the end of June,” Janssens said.

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