Cardiff and Cunningham students will become full-fledged members of the St. Albert Catholic school district under a proposed provincial bill — something their parents have been wanting for the last four years.
In addition to shuffling the public and separate school boards in St. Albert and Sturgeon County, Bill 4, tabled in the Alberta Legislature last week, would also merge the Cardiff and Cunningham Roman Catholic separate school districts with Greater St. Albert Catholic Schools.
Small separate school districts like these are often called “four-by-fours” in reference to the days where schools served everyone within a four-square-mile region.
Located near Cardiff and just west of St. Albert, the Cardiff and Cunningham districts consist of 86 students, one provincially appointed trustee, and no schools or staff. Local residents formed the districts in 2008 and 2009, respectively, to get their students bus service to Catholic schools in Morinville and St. Albert.
The Cardiff board planned to merge with St. Albert Catholic soon after its creation, says Stephen Cymbol, the board’s trustee, but the province refused because of a technicality — separate boards are meant to protect religious minorities from public boards, which are usually non-Catholic, so the province isn’t supposed to merge them. In St. Albert the Protestant board was separate and the Catholic board was public.
Bill 4 would eliminate this problem by making St. Albert Catholic into a separate board, allowing for a merger, Cymbol says. “This resolution meets the original desire of parents in the Cardiff area.”
The bill will also make education financing much simpler, says St. Albert Catholic superintendant David Keohane — instead of billing the Cardiff and Cunningham boards for the cost of teaching their students and having those boards bill the province, St. Albert Catholic will assume direct responsibility for Cardiff and Cunningham students and send the bill to the province.
And it will give local parents the chance to vote for their own trustee, Keohane says. “This is outstanding news for them.”
Cardiff won’t be big enough to have its own trustee if a merger happens, Cymbol says, so he’ll be out of a job. He suspects he will stay on as trustee until the end of August if the bill passes.
