As the debate over closing Rideau heats up, Lisgar parents are concerned about the domino effect of the potential relocation of students to their school, which they say is already over capacity.
Ottawa-Carleton District School Board staff has recommended the closure of Rideau High School due to low enrolment.
If the proposal is approved by the board, Rideau will close by next September with 65 students redirected to Lisgar in 2010. Twenty more students are also likely to come from the current Rideau catchment area in future years.
While Lisgar parents recognize that the potential influx of students the school is rather small compared to the total number of students who attend Lisgar, the issue is that the school is already overcrowded this year.
Elizabeth Buckingham, parent of a Lisgar student, says she doubts the school’s capacity to accommodate more students.
“I look around and find no spare classroom at the school,” says Buckingham. “I’m wondering where the principal is going to put those students.”
She notes that Lisgar currently has 20 to 30 more Grade 12 students than in historical records, and 10 to 20 more students in Grade 10 and 11 than is ideal.
Placed fourth in Eastern Ontario and 21st in the province in Fraser Institute’s high school ranking last spring, Lisgar has no difficulty drawing students from various parts across the city, which is quite the opposite to Rideau, the third from the bottom in Eastern Ontario and 626th in Ontario.
Buckingham suggests Lisgar’s overcrowding problem could be solved through additional changes to the transfer policy.
“If the principal could have some flexibility in putting a cap per grade, it’d make it easier to keep student numbers equal in every grade,” she says.
There is also concern that overcrowding will lead to a decrease in the number of gifted students the school can accommodate.
Among the 1,080 students attending Lisgar, about 100 are cross-boundary transfer students and almost half of them are gifted. If the school accepts 65 additional transfer students from Rideau, Lisgar will likely have to decline all additional transfer next year. This means that gifted students from the outside boundary may not be able to attend Lisgar.
A report released by the school board in June concluded that a minimum of 300 gifted students are needed at a high school in order to deem its specialized programming a success.
David Paull, who co-chairs the parent council, points out that the critical mass under which a gifted program needs to work demands a certain pattern of student make-up.
Paull says the transfer pattern recommended in the Rideau closure report is “a random formula created by bureaucrats that doesn’t reflect the need and the ability of the school.
“Each community school, like Lisgar, has a unique connection to the community that only the principal and teachers know the best,” he says.
“The principal and staff should have more say to ensure both the grade level and program cohorts could be balanced in a way that our strong music, advanced placement and gifted programs would thrive.”
Somerset School Trustee Jennifer McKenzie says trustees will consult with the community to make sure that all programs in affected schools stay strong, with a good balance in the school and in the community as a whole.
But parents say they are unable to make their submission to trustees at this point because some pieces of the puzzle are missing.
Two other reviews on gifted programs and cross-boundary transfer policy, which were supposed to be released together with the accommodation study on school closures, are not expected be released until Nov. 17.
Rachel Eugster, who co-chairs the parent council with Paull, says that these three reviews are interrelated and should not be conducted in isolation.
“It is really difficult, if not impossible, to assess the impact of the accommodation study without knowing what gifted programme and transfer policy plans the school board has in mind,” she says.