St. Albert's public board trustees say they're frustrated with the city's school site allocation agreement and look set to tear it up. Trustees however fell short of walking away from the process during Wednesday's board meeting.
Trustee Sheri Wright's motion to have the board signal its intent to withdraw from the agreement by the end of this August was about to go to a vote before Trustee Gerry Martins moved to refer it back to committee. That motion passed 3-2 – trustees Wright and Kim Armstrong were opposed – delaying the vote until later this year.
The school site agreement outlines how the superintendents of the Greater St. Albert Catholic, St. Albert Public, and Greater North Central Francophone school boards are to collaborate with St. Albert's city manager to decide which board gets which school site.
The agreement also allows any of its parties to end the deal on Aug. 31 so long as they formally signal their intent to do so by April 1. They can cancel that signal any time prior to Aug. 31 without consequence.
The Catholic board threatened to leave the deal last year unless it got a school site in the Jensen Lakes region. That led the committee to split the sole site there 70/30 between the public and Catholic boards.
Wright throws gauntlet
St. Albert has changed quite a bit since this agreement was first signed decades ago, Wright said.
"We are in a position now where we have very close to 70 per cent of the (city's) students going to our schools," she said, yet the agreement treats the public board the same as the other two boards. The agreement says it is necessary that there be a "balance" of school jurisdiction presence in the city.
"It's no longer a 50/50 thing."
The allocation process has lead to clashes over the new francophone school in Erin Ridge, the unwanted school site in Oakmont, and the Jensen Lakes site, the latter of which may have significant traffic problems due to how it was divided, Wright said.
"All of that could have been less of a worry if we had the (Jensen) site to ourselves."
The current process is not serving the board's needs and is pitting boards against each other, Wright argued. It would be better for the board to leave the deal and deal directly with the city.
The deal is outdated and needs to be replaced, Armstrong agreed.
"Our district has grown beyond the size with which we can share the bedroom comfortably," she said.
"We want to be able to define where our schools should go."
Board chair Glenys Edwards said the site agreement assumed a size-parity between the boards that no longer existed, and that it no longer met the board's needs.
"We've had a lot of frustration in the last few years, and we need to talk about this."
Trustee Cheryl Dumont said she wasn't happy with the Jensen Lakes decision, but believed the board should work within the agreement to reform it.
And dropping the agreement wouldn't fix the city's problem, Trustee Gerry Martins said.
"The problem in St. Albert is we don't have sufficient school sites," he said.
"It is up to the city (councillors) to get their act together to make sure we do have the proper-sized sites, that we have sufficient sites."
What alternative?
No one's really sure what a replacement for the agreement would look like, public board superintendent Barry Wowk said. It could mean letting city councillors pick which board gets which site – right now, they just approve creation of sites through area structure plans.
And when council is making the decision, site allocation becomes a roll of the dice, said Mayor Nolan Crouse in an interview. The public (Protestant) board may have 70 per cent of the students, but 70 per cent of city council isn't necessarily Protestant. Council would have to account for many other factors in its decisions, and might force boards to build taller schools to reduce sprawl.
"The province does have to step up," he added – it has to decide if Catholic and public boards should always get one site each, and it has to change rules that keep boards from sharing facilities.
"That is so 1940s thinking. School jurisdictions across the province have to find ways to share assets."
Catholic board superintendent David Keohane and francophone board superintendent Henri Lemire declined to comment on the board's decision.
