The "holding school" is St Mary's and it is open.
The thing is, LMST and St Mary's draw kids in from outside the district, and St Mary's has a subsidized daycare, so a lot of health care type workers who take the bus and live in Dartmouth/Sackville put their kids in St Mary's. So, while population trends to 2006 indicated downward trends, last year, 2010/11, it looked like this, first number is enrolment, second capacity.
St Stephen 206 / 352
St Joe/AMM 249 / 396
St Catherine's 350 / 550
Oxford 350 (P-9) / 710
Joe Howe 103, with St Pats closed that goes to 160 / 286
St Mary's 116 /132
LMST 336 / 286
Tupper 277 / 308
Inglis 210 / 308
So this is actually pretty good, if you have to keep firmly in mind that a lot of these schools don't have specialized program delivery rooms, and the way HRSB calculated total capacity was any classroom shaped room was a classroom for capacity, even if it has an ESL program in it (for example).
So back in 2007, they proposed tearing down schools with classrooms used as program spaces, to build schools with slightly smaller rooms for program spaces.
I think the glaring one is Oxford. You could close that, but then the closest junior high for downtown is a 3.5 km walk, and that sucks. There is an argument to be made to put a JHS in a replaced or renovated Quinpool/St Pats.
There is no simple solution left to consolidate schools to save money. Each new school is $10-15 million, and there are no empty fields in the middle of the city waiting for them (except, ahm, maybe Bloomfield). If you closed St Mary's to go into Inglis, there is not enough space to do that in the building, so you need to put a wing on.
I think this is as optimized as we can get for a couple decades, with the exception of Oxford.
EDIT - when people talk about "the population drop on the peninsula" it kills me.... people in my neighbourhood used to have 8-12 kids. That is what changed. LMST main building, when it was the Catholic "St Thomas School" had 750 kids in it, 45 to a room.