Q. How can school service centers and the government not plan for the construction of schools when the cohorts of children are known in advance?
Sylvain Millette
R. Modular classrooms will not be disappearing anytime soon at the Montreal School Service Center, our journalist Marie-Eve Morasse recently reported.
We had installed nearly a hundred in 2018, among other things because, you are right to point out, we had not built enough new schools or new classes in time to accommodate the children likely to enroll. .
You are also right to point out that needs are, at least approximately, known as soon as children are born.
What is the problem ?
The number one factor is undoubtedly underfunding, which has been the rule in school infrastructure for too long.
The school boards (which have since been replaced by service centers) occasionally made known their needs in terms of new classes and new schools… but Quebec did not necessarily give the green light to all these requests. The allocated budget does not always correspond to these needs. The reception capacity therefore did not keep up with demand.
And the problem, as we have seen in recent years in Montreal in certain areas, can often be exacerbated by the lack of land available for the construction of new schools.
We therefore speak of “a lack of long-term vision”, deplores the Autonomous Federation of Education, questioned on this subject.
To that you have to add some sources of bureaucratic irritation.
Allow us to present to you the case of the Sainte-Lucie school, in the Saint-Michel district, which has been rebuilt. Its former director Kathleen Legault explains that a reconstruction request must be made separately from an expansion request. And these two requests “will not necessarily be processed according to the same timelines.”
In addition, Quebec did not offer as many new classes as what was requested for the Sainte-Lucie school. It was felt that there was sufficient space in other schools in the neighborhood.
Result: when the new school opens its doors in January, it will have three 5-year-old kindergarten classes, while the request would have allowed its director to open four. Neither will it be possible to open more than two 4-year-old kindergarten classes there, nor to offer premises to the English teacher.
“We were talking about adding five or six premises to a school and not finding a site! When we have the land, can we make it profitable? », Launches Kathleen Legault, who is now the head of the Montreal Association of School Managers.
Having said that, going back to the premise of your question, you can’t plan everything through birth-based predictions and arithmetic.
As Marie-Eve Morasse indicated in her article, modular classes can also prove to be essential when students have to move students because, precisely, their school must be rebuilt or renovated.
It is also difficult to estimate the number of additional places that will be necessary because of the influx of new arrivals in a given neighborhood. For example, in 2018, we were talking about the addition of no less than 3,831 students in reception classes only at the Montreal school board. Not to mention the impact on the capacity of schools of the appearance of large residential complexes over the years. The most glaring case in recent years being Griffintown.
Conversely, as we can see this year, a crisis such as the pandemic can cause the number of students to drop. There are 2,500 fewer in the territory of the Montreal School Service Center. That’s a hundred groups less, or the equivalent of four or five primary schools!
In short, a good part of the cohorts are known in advance, yes, but it is far from an exact science.
Read Marie-Eve Morasse’s article