Cree school hoping for provincial dollars to expand into new facility
- Angela Hill | March 13, 2018
The parent advocacy group at St. Frances Cree Bilingual School are looking ahead to March and the release of the provincial budget. They have high hopes that their children’s school will receive funding so they will be able to expand and move into a new facility.
The goal is to see renovations made to on a new school built at the former Sion Middle School site, on 7th Street and Grosvenor Avenue, because there are concerns about space for changes at the existing St. Frances site.
Roberta McIntyre is one of the parents. She has one child in the school currently, with others either about to enter or finished.
“It’s important for me, for my children, my grandchildren, to learn Cree, to learn the culture,” she said. “Without them learning their language, without them learning their culture, they won’t have a sense of identity.”
She isn’t alone with how she feels. In the past 11 years, the school has grown from about 80 students to more than 600.
“When we started there were 11 classrooms in the core of the building, but [now] we’ve got 14 portable classrooms on site,” said Gordon Martell, superintendent of learning services for Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools (GSCS).
Martell said their successes, including receiving the 2017 Premier’s Board of Education Award for Innovation and Excellence in Education, and many partnerships including with Saskatoon Tribal Council and educator training programs, has lead to “a critical space shortage.”
The addition of the portables has cut the playground space to half an acre, a space smaller than half a football field, and there is no dedicated space for a computer room, arts education, science programming or a cultural learning environment, he said.
“We have a closet, practically, for our elder in residence,” Martell said.
The lunch program feeds about 400 students daily, but the kitchen isn’t large enough to accommodate people who want to come in and help, said McIntyre.
She thinks the worst part is the lack of space for all the parents and kids to come together for celebrations.
“We can’t even put on events, Christmas concerts and stuff like that … because we don’t have the space.”
So, the advocacy group formed to support the push for a new space. The parents have given tours to politicians and administrators and written letters.
“They’ve worked with us to bring stakeholder partners together to do information-sharing events, they’ve held, in conjunction with the board, consultation with the whole school community, so we’ve had hundreds of parents and children come out and add their voices to the needs at St. Frances,” Martell said.
“They’re just a wonderful group of very, very dedicated parents that understand the value of First Nations language learning and they’re willing to stand up and support the program.”
The new school is the number one priority for GSCS in terms of facilities, and it has been for a number of years. Martell said the Ministry of Education understands this, but he said GSCS is waiting to see if the funding follows. Without the financing, it will be up to the school division to make some difficult choices, he said.
“We are at crossroads here, a critical point, in that we can’t add anymore portables,” he said.
However, he hopes that doesn’t mean they will have to deny any student entry.
“I suppose that’s always an option, although not an option that we prefer. I really have a hard time, ethically, to deny a student Indigenous language learning. That’s a tough one for me as an Indigenous person especially, that would be tough.”