By Valencia Grant
St. Anthony’s elementary school parents are hoping economic and security concerns will persuade the local Catholic school board not to close the building and move their children out of the neighbourhood.
Angelo Filoso, the chairman of the Neighbourhood Alert Association, says the board would have to spend money on security.
He says that if the move went through, it should follow the example of business owners on Gladstone Avenue who have hired private security to patrol the area.
Money would also have to be spent on fencing the McNabb school grounds since the area has been associated with prostitution and drug-related problems.
The board announced it will make its decision on April 3 or 10.
Many people in the community expected a decision to take place on March 6.
Phil Rocco, the board’s director of education, acknowledges it wants to carefully assess all of their concerns.
“There’s a lot of concern about the traffic in the area,” he says, “so we’d have to look at all of that.”
Rocco is referring to concerns about the heavy traffic along Bronson Avenue. Parents are also alarmed at the possibility of their children being located near McNabb Park, which is littered with condoms and contaminated needles.
Another concern are the t costs of busing students from Booth to Percy streets.
Filoso says the school would need about four extra buses to transport students. He estimates each bus would cost $30,000 per year, for a total of $120,000 annually.
Rob Farmilo, a community member, asked at a March 6 board meeting,
“Why can you spend $60,000 on transportation of kids out of their parish and not take that same added value that seems to be there and put it back into the school?”asks Farmilo.
The board also uses figures to defend the move. Rocco says renovating the 33-year-old McNabb public school building would cost around $150,000.
However, the 95-year-old St. Anthony’s school building would cost about $1.6 million to repair.
But students of alternative public high schools in the McNabb public school building are saying they don’t want to move. There are some 200 students in the Richard Pfaff Secondary Alternate Program and about 50 in the other two schools called First Place and Reality Check.
Kylie Gobeil and other students of the Richard Pfaff Secondary Alternate Program — a half-day school for students who can’t perform well in a traditional high school setting where more than one subject is taught in a day — are circulating a petition to prevent the schools from leaving the building.
Officials of the Alternate Program say they have no idea where the schools would move to if St. Anthony’s comes to their building.
“We’ve had the support of some teachers although we’re not supposed to say that,” she says.
“It’s been basically all of our own doing,” says Gobeil, 18. “We just don’t understand, if they don’t want to come and we don’t want to leave, why it’s a big deal,” she adds.