The race is on for Lakeland Catholic Schools. The Bonnyville-based separate school district is planning to start the process of expanding into Lac La Biche with a census that could start as early as this week, Lakeland officials announced at a public meeting in Lac La Biche April 16.
The race is on for Lakeland Catholic Schools.
The Bonnyville-based separate school district is planning to start the process of expanding into Lac La Biche with a census that could start as early as this week, Lakeland officials announced at a public meeting in Lac La Biche April 16.
The census could take a minimum of two months, and LCS chair Mary Anne Penner said that depending on the results, and a possible vote, a September 2014 opening date for a Catholic school in town is possible.
"I'm looking forward to the coming results of the census, we'll go from there and we'll see what happens with the vote," Penner said to about 60 people at Lac La Biche's St. Catherine's Catholic Church where the meeting was held. "Then we'll go forward and if the good Lord blesses us, we'll have a Catholic school in Lac La Biche."
Details yet to be decided include the grades the school will serve, its possible size, where it would be located, and whether Lac La Biche qualifies or would vote for a separate district.
"How things go with the census that's being done will determine how far we can go with this. A lot hangs on the census," Penner said.
The region that LCS has planned for the school district stretches about two-thirds of the way around Lac La Biche Lake, including the Lac La Biche townsite and the Lac La Biche Mission but not Plamondon.
If the census found that Catholic voters were a minority in those areas, they can hold a meeting to vote for the district: At least 25 per cent of the Catholics in the area must attend, and if 50 per cent vote in favour the provincial government must establish a separate school district.
At the meeting, Lakeland Catholic Schools representatives explained their educational system, which works a focus on religion into all parts of the curriculum.
Lakeland officials gave high praise to their system - and their students.
"We believe that each student is a unique gift from God to be respected," LCS superintendent Joe Arruda said at the meeting. "We operate within the provincial parameters to deliver the best programming we can."
After the presentation was a question-and-answer period that lasted about 50 minutes where parents and a number of officials from the public Northern Lights School Division and francophone East Central Francophone Education districts posed questions to the Catholic school representatives.
The questions covered included a number of different topics, inlcuding staffing and student busing. Teachers at the school would be laypeople, not clergy, said Lakeland officials, and could include non-Catholics. Residents in rural areas of the County or Plamondon outside of the proposed district could choose to send students to the Catholic school but there wouldn't be any buses provided.
The grades covered by the school could vary based on interest: according to Arruda, 100 students would work for a K-6 school but not K-12.
Penner wouldn't specify a minimum number of students they would require before going ahead.
"We'd have to see which grade level they would fit into, where we would go and what the number would be," Penner said. "Sometimes, if we have to start small and work up, we've done that."
One of the biggest questions at the meeting was the way a possible Catholic board and the Northern Lights School Division would work together.
NLSD chairperson Arlene Hrynyk pointed out a part of the LCS handout that read: "Catholic school supporters... do not believe the existence of a Catholic school district in this area will do anything but strengthen the community and the public school system."
"Could you please describe how it would strengthen the public school system?" Hrynyk asked.
Arruda replied that competition is good.
"Our system will try very hard to earn the respect of parents, as will the public system," he said. "When you have competing interests, it leads to better results."
After the meeting, Hrynyk said she didn't think the question was answered.
"I think the only concern I would always worry about is, I heard about competition and I can never (use) the word competition for children," she said. "When you're in a smaller community, you only have 'x' amount of students, so you always worry about how you can provide the best programming for those students, because we know that with less you can do less."
Hrynyk praised the idea of a mix of faiths in schools. "I think the beauty of our public schools is the rich diversity within and the wonderful value that we have by representation of all faiths and all students," she said.
But Penner said LCS has a major difference: they focus education on religious principles.
"Our mandate is Catholic education. We're a faith-based school, we're Christ-centred," Penner said. "The public school (does) not have that mandate to do that."
Part of the opportunity for another school division to expand into Lac La Biche was created by the construction of the new J.A. Williams High School. It's estimated that there will be about 1,000 spaces for students in two schools that will be closed after the move.
Some of those spaces have already been taken by the East Central Francophone Education's new Francophone Pre-K to Grade 2 school in Lac La Biche.
ECFE Superintendent Marc Dumont said the board has reached an agreement with the NLSD to locate it in an interim basis in Central Elementary School. According to Dumont, parents in a Francophone school have the right to determine whether the school is Catholic or public: currently, all their schools are Catholic.
The whole school picture in Lac La Biche is unclear, Hrynyk said, because reconfiguration plans and public consultation were based on just one school district in the area.
“That community input to that process may just have to stop because we are not going to know the impact to our own system,” Hrynyk said. “That may mean we’ ll have to go through the full reconfiguration process again. Right now we haven’ t deemed anything surplus.”
Also complicating matters is, according to Hrynyk, that construction deadlines are “tight” at the new Bold Center school, and relocation may not happen by this September.
“With the construction at the phase it’ s at, it’ s going to be very tight, so there may not be time for all three schools... to be ready for September 1,” Hrynyk said. “We’ re hoping, we’ re praying that we will get the keys in time, because then they have to go through a whole process of tests.”
Penner said that vacancy is an issue left up to the ministry.
“When it comes right down to it, the schools are basically owned by the Department of Education, so I guess the Minister has to make that call,” she said.
The census will be completed in at least two months, and LCS officials said they could deliver on a school in September 2014 if they have an answer by mid-June.
“We have very dedicated staff,” Penner said. “If they had the mandate to go ahead in here, they are committed to making it happen by the start date of school (in) 2014.”
