Lisgar Collegiate Institute’s enrolment numbers haven’t budged since a more restrictive cross-district transfer policy was put into place in 2010, prompting observers to suggest recently that some parents are packing up and moving into the downtown area just to guarantee their children an automatic place in the popular school.
Two years after the controversial policy was implemented to curb the rising number of transfer requests in Ottawa, the Centretown school’s annual enrolment has held steady at around 1,100.
The Ottawa Citizen reported recently that parents determined to secure a spot for their children at Lisgar may be going so far as to move downtown or purchase a property in the area to qualify for enrolment at the school without having to obtain one of the few transfer openings now available under the new rules.
But school board trustee Jennifer McKenzie says she hasn’t heard of any specific cases of families moving.
“I would suspect that given that it’s such a huge financial decision, that most families would not take that decision lightly and there wouldn’t be a huge number of families that were doing that,” she says.
The number of transfer requests certainly took a hit in the policy’s first year, McKenzie added, acknowledging that the number of approved applications was similarly affected.
Schools such as Hillcrest High have not been so lucky. Enrolment there has dropped drastically, forcing the school to do away with some extracurricular programming and even reduce the number of teachers.
The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board passed the policy back in 2010 to limit the number of students transferring to public schools outside of their home district. Prior to the enactment of the policy, transfers were granted on a first-come, first-served basis. Lisgar, with its strong academic reputation, would sometimes see family members camp overnight in front of the school’s entrance to be near the front of the line the day transfer spots were opened.
In 2010, Lisgar accepted about 80 transfer applications but turned down another 220, according to a Citizen report at the time.
Now, students have a two-week period every year in which to apply to schools outside their own district. Transfers are granted at the discretion of the principal of the school in which the student wishes to enrol.
“I’ve heard stories about people moving districts, it’s nothing new,” says James Fraser, a former cross-district transfer student. He says that if the policy had been in place when he chose Lisgar over his district high school, his parents wouldn’t have made the move downtown.
Fraser says students should be able to choose the school that’s right for them.
The reality is that someone’s community school may not be best equipped to deal with their individual needs, he says, whether such needs are French Immersion programming, an enriched program, or escaping bullies.
“It is not unusual when a family is looking to buy a house to be considering the schools in the neighbourhood,” McKenzie says.
“But generally the curriculum is the same, and the teachers move from school to school.”
As the top public high school in Ottawa, as rated by the Fraser Institute, and 14th in all of Ontario, Lisgar has long been the object of many prospective students’ fancy.