Creemore’s senior public school will get two new kindergarten classrooms plus renovations to the library and gymnasium as part of a proposed three-year plan to prepare for full-day kindergarten, which was unveiled at a School Council meeting earlier this week.
The senior site at 240 Collingwood Street will need to be renovated to accommodate an increase in student numbers due to the closure of the junior site at 22 Caroline Street West effective next summer and the arrival of full-day kindergarten in September 2014.
Simcoe County District School Board Trustee Caroline Smith (pictured) presented the “concept floor plan” to a group of 15 parents at the meeting.
The School Board does not make its building plans public to protect the safety of its students and staff members from intruders.
There are three parts to the plan: phase one will see two kindergarten classrooms added by fall 2014. In phase two, the library will be renovated and in phase three the gymnasium will be enlarged, Smith told the group.
The renovations will likely necessitate the use of one or two portable classrooms for one or two years, as well as mixed-grade classrooms, said Principal Heather Birchall.
Some parents expressed concern when they learned the renovated gym would no longer have a stage. Some discussed the need to redesign the play area around the school space so that younger children would be separated from older children during recess.
Other parents wished to preserve history by relocating the historic bell from the primary site to the senior site. “Creemore is a community where the same families have lived in the area for generations,” said Smith, acknowledging that the Board will take all of these requests into account.
Smith encouraged Birchall to send a “wishlist” of parents’ requests to the Superintendent of Facility Services, John Dance, by December.
“NCPS has over 100 students fewer than it did 10 years ago,” said Dance. “Now they don’t fill the Creemore site and we barely have the classes to fill the senior site.”
Currently, there are 80 students enrolled in kindergarten and Grades 1 and 2 at the junior site, but only 60 are present at any one time because kindergarten is only half-day. The junior site has a capacity of 135. There are 121 students in the senior site.
“We haven’t lost students – they aren’t being born,” said Smith, referring to Clearview’s declining population. “There is a concern that the numbers may drop more before they rise again.”
Parents agreed the two buildings contribute to a feeling of disconnectedness between students, staff members and parents. They said it was inefficient for teachers to travel between the sites to teach or share equipment such as cameras and iPads. Even the school buses have to come to two different school buildings, added one parent.
“The Creemore site is a lovely old building but it’s hard to maintain, hard to keep warm and it’s not accessible,” said Dance.