Enrolment at St. Albert Catholic High School (SACHS) is up 13 per cent this year, putting the brakes on years of steady declines.
Prior to this year the school had seen its enrolment slip by 38 per cent over seven years but a boost in Grade 10 enrolments has reversed that trend and raised the total student population to about 600.
School administration attributes the reversal to an increase in program offerings combined with an increase in marketing activity and the opening of a large new addition at the front of the school. But the biggest factor in changing the tide for SACHS this year has been support from the division’s junior high schools, which have made an effort to highlight what’s available at the high school, said co-principal Cathy Rasmussen.
“It’s funny in this town how the trend changes. One school will be the good school for a while and then another school will be the good school,” she said.
SACHS students have always delivered high academic scores, leading some to view it as an academic school. This year the school added programs in cosmetology and knowledge and employability, for students looking to enter the work force right after high school.
“There are certainly worse reputations to have than being a very high academic school but I think there were students that assumed that there wasn’t programming for them,” Rasmussen said. “We’ve been trying really hard to show that we have programming for everybody.”
This year the school retained 70 per cent of students coming out of V.J. Maloney junior high and 80 per cent from R.S. Fowler. Last year, those retention rates were under half, Rasmussen said.
She and superintendent David Keohane would both like to see enrolment grow to about 750 students. Any more would make it more difficult for school administration to remember students’ names and communicate effectively with families, they said.
“We don’t ever want to be in a situation where it’s about putting as many bodies [as possible] in a place,” Keohane said.
The school board is thrilled with the turnaround after working for the last few years to boost the program offerings at the school. Trustee Jacquie Hansen thinks the main reason SACHS was losing students was the school didn’t have the variety of option classes as other schools.
“For many years it has been known for some solely as an academic high school,” said Hansen, who represents the board on the SACHS school council. “Once you start to lose students you don’t get funding so it’s a bit of a spiral down.”
Contributing to the enrolment spiral that high schools face is the influence of peers. Students want to go where their friends are and their decisions often defy administrative logic.
“Sometimes you get a leader in a group that decides for some reason to go to a different school and they end up taking five or six of their friends with them,” Rasmussen said.
SACHS has been the beneficiary of peer influence this year, as a number of students transferred over in mid-September after learning their friends were going to SACHS, she said.
