About 200 people packed the Prince of Peace School gym for a public consultation meeting on the future and possible closure of the school.
“It was a very difficult meeting, but I feel that it went well,” said Rocky View Schools (RVS) Board of Trustees Chair Todd Brand.
The Prince of Peace program is thriving however RVS does not own the building and the current lease is set to expire after this school year.
In 2010, RVS took over the Prince of Peace School program from the Lutheran Church of Canada but the church retained ownership of the building, leasing the space to RVS.
In 2015, the church was granted bankruptcy protection and Sage Properties Corp. was created and administers ownership of the school building.
With negotiations ongoing to renew the lease, RVS has begun the process of exploring their options in regard to the future of Prince of Peace School.
This process led to the public meeting to keep parents and the community appraised of the options for the school.
RVS has identified three possible options for the future of the program: Lease or purchase the school building, move the program & RVS district resident students to an existing RVS school, or close the program.
The preferred option, especially by parents is for Either the current building to be purchased or leased or another site found that can house the entire school population.
If neither of these can be done, the more than 300 Prince of Peace students who live in Calgary will be forced to attend school at either a Calgary Catholic or Public school next year.
RVS can only accept out of district students if there is extra space in a RVS school.
If Prince of Peace is closed and the resident students move to other RVS schools, all of the Chestermere area schools will be at or over capacity, preventing any Calgary students from being accepted.
RVS has approached the provincial government, who makes the decisions to build or purchase schools, to purchase the school but this request has been denied twice.
And while negotiations are ongoing with Sage Properties, their preference is to sell the building to recoup the losses suffered by investors in the Lutheran Church’s bankruptcy.
While they will continue to speak with the government, Brand said that the RVS board will also be hard at work looking at alternatives and possible solutions for the school.
“That’s what we will be doing over the next couple of months,” said Brand, “we’ll be looking at all options plus we’ll be just fielding ideas and comments from people in the public.”
“The bottom line is to keep everyone together at that school we need to have a long-term building in order to do that.
“And at present we don’t have access to a long-term building to keep all those students together,” he said.
Ramona Bagley, who has two children attending Prince of Peace, was at the meeting and agreed that it went well.
She was particularly happy to see all the support in the room for finding a way to save Prince of Peace.
“I thought the meeting went really, really well,” she said, “it was amazing how much support we had.”
While concerned by the possible closure of the school, Bagley was happy to see what work was being done by the school board.
“It was interesting to see what the reality of everything is, like as far as…the numbers for maintenance on the building and the cost of the building and what options they’re looking at,” said Bagley.
“The optimum of course is being at our present site and with our present teachers and continuing the program,” she said.
“We definitely don’t want to break up the family and by dividing it between Rocky View residents and Calgary residents that would break up the family,” said Bagley of the two options that would see the school population split.
Bagley said that the next steps for parents is to pass on any ideas to save the school to the school board and then to rally the community and school parents to work to save the school.
She is hoping that the greater community can be roused to their cause.
“If Prince of Peace does shut down its going to have an impact on Chestermere,” said Bagley.
She said that if the Prince of Peace students are forced to move to Chestermere schools, the impacts will be felt beyond just large class sizes and crowded classrooms.
“It has to do with parking it has to do with field trips,” she said, “it has to do with the gymnasium and events.”
“All of a sudden when you’ve got a school that’s at 102 per cent capacity, your Christmas concert gets busy.
“And you don’t have any place to park when you come for a Christmas concert,” said Bagley.
She also pointed out that user groups that rent space at the Prince of Peace school building will also lose out if the building is closed and sold.
“There’s men’s basketball hosted at Prince of Peace…there’s karate tournaments that are hosted at Prince of Peace,” she said, “they won’t have that gym facility or that space to rent anymore.”
As a program of choice in the RVS system, Prince of Peace offers a Christian based education within the governance of a public school board.
The school is one of three such Christian programs of choice offered by RVS with the others located in Airdrie and Cochrane.
“It would be nice to maintain that program that we’ve grown to love and really enjoy the program Prince of Peace offers, it’s a really unique program,” said Bagley.
“It’ll be sad to see it go if it does go anywhere,” she said.
Those supporting the school are being encouraged to write letters to the Minister of Education, area MLA Leela Aheer and the RVS board.
Anyone looking for more information on the campaign to save the school can go to the facebook page #SavePrinceOf Peace.
To view the meeting presentation slides or for information on the next steps can go to www.rockyview.ab.ca/consultation
An interview request was made with Alberta Education, but no response was received by The Anchor by press time.
