Golden Hills School Division prepares for upcoming year

By Miriam Ostermann, Associate Editor

With a new facility pending and existing class sizes at capacity, Golden Hills School Division (GHSD) urged parents to make a decision by May 31 on which elementary school to send their children to in the fall.
Previously, parents had until September to arrive at a decision. However, with the new Kindergarten to Grade 9 George Freeman School scheduled to open later this year, parents were encouraged to have their registrations completed this week to aid in the board’s organization and staffing.
“We’re seeing some movement in our schools. It’s much different than a regular year because regularly there isn’t that much movement; there’s a little bit but it’s entirely manageable. This year it’s a different story,” said Bevan Daverne, GHSD superintendent.
“It’s not unexpected, we just don’t know where it’s coming from. It could be that we have 100 students in one school and only 20 from another and we have to get our staffing in place and figure out if we have to hire new staff or transfer staff. We sort of need to make those decisions now rather than first thing in September when we see students showing up.”
According to Daverne, well over 100 registrations for the George Freeman School – which has a capacity of 500 – had already been received by last week.
Currently, Strathmore is home to four GHSD elementary schools, all of which are at capacity or slightly above capacity. The addition of the new school is expected to help reduce some of the pressures on the existing elementary schools and junior high school.
While École Brentwood Elementary, Wheatland Elementary, Westmount Elementary and Trinity Christian Academy are already established in the community and known for their athletics, leadership, music and work with STEM – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – George Freeman School has access to the new regional recreation facility (Strathmore Motor Products Sports Centre) and can therefore offer programs that were unavailable before. Furthermore, the school will pay tribute to its namesake by focusing on environmental stewardship and volunteerism.
According to Daverne, the board ideally envisions 150 students for the first year at the new school, and while he emphasized the academic achievements of all schools, being able to hire the proper staff is necessary to ensure the quality of education.
“We want the very best teachers in all of our schools and in order to get the very best, we need to get our advertising and our staffing done now,” he said. “Obviously, we’re going to respect parents’ choice regardless of when they choose to exercise it, but if at all possible for us we kind of need to hear from parents now … that will help us out enormously.”