Re-Purposing inner & almost inner-city schools

[Cage]

I'm in the camp with OP, there should be more consideration to closing innercity schools where the local student population warrants it.

I point to Dalhousie as an example. There are currently two public elementary schools where only one is viable. The second school survives on a spanish immersion program that covers the whole NW division. Even with the Spanish immersion program, the school has poor utilization rate.

Closing one school in Dalhousise and implementing a bussing option is the most feasable use of funds. This way CBE does not have an operating budget that grows faster than population growth as there would be operating funds available to fully staff a new school in suburbs.

As for waiting until the next student population boom is going to happen, quite frankly, it will never come back to the hay days of mid70s and 80s. My wife's family has lived in Dalhousie all her life. MIL still lives in the same house and likely will for next 15 years. Same goes for most of the neighbors on MIL street. They had kids, who moved out to the burbs and the street residence are now grandparents. There has probably been about 50% turnover, but again this points to a need for only 1 school.

To the suggestion the school should lie dormant or be repurposed, I am opposed to the suggestion for Calgary area. Most older schools are based on the track of K-6, 7-9, 10-12 with the k-6 schools being in overabundent supply. Turning a K-6 school into K-9 school costs mega $ and stioll requires the pruning of the 7-9 school. better attempt to build new, even if the build new is in the same location. For example Highwood should consider dusting all their k-6 schools and colocating to a single K-9 school with advanced features that can compete with suburban school.

And for the record Freeweed, I live in Citadel and school was clearly on the list of factors when chosing a community. We shortlisted Tuscany and Royal Oak in our list as well. However, my wife and I were also trying to conceive at the same time as finding our first home outside of the downtown core. Were it not for getting on the family fast track; i doubt school would have enterred into the consideration criteria. Instead we would assume (like a lot of other suburban families) the elementary school would be built within first 10 years of community buildout. Further, with specific reference to Royal Oak, our assumption was the new elementary school was being built, We could not have assumed that RO elementary would be overpopulated day 1 and would still require some students to take a hefty bus ride to alternate school.