Why we should preserve the Allion school site

I live in a sleepy, residential neigbourhood where every second house has a wagon or bike parked outside, and young families stroll the tree-lined streets and wander the paths beside the river.  So it was a rude awakening when we learned that plans were well underway to transform the former Allion Elementary School site in our neighbourhood, and to take away its educational zoning.  In fact, according to minutes of the LBPSB committee meetings, the school board commissioners had already agreed to sell it before it was even empty of students and staff.

Some might argue that rehabilitating a disused school is a great idea, and perhaps it is, until you consider  the tsunami of babies and young children, resulting from the provincial government’s family policies, just starting to enter the Quebec education system. Then you have to ask why the LBPSB, whose job it is to know about demographic trends, is in such a hurry to sell this educational asset to a non-educational developer, and why the Minister for Education would sign off on a sale like this?




According to official figures, it is clear that this school campus is going to be needed for the education of our children, regardless of which school board manages it, in the very near future.  Quebec’s “fertility rate”  over the past three years has been consistently higher than at any other time in the past thirty years. In fact, Quebec now boasts the highest birthrate in Canada.  Just look around you, there are young children everywhere.

The Quebec Education Ministry  (MELS) recently reduced the class size for elementary students, and in April 2011, announced $300 million dollars in investments to build new schools and/or expand existing ones which according to the Minister should bring “a solution to the increase in enrollment, which according to our projections, should continue to rise in the coming years.”

So, the number of students across the province is rapidly swelling; boroughs like Lasalle and Verdun are on residential building sprees, communities like Nun’s Island and St Lazare are already struggling to find appropriate sites for their much needed community schools; still other schools are being built or expanded; some school boards are buying and/or rehabilitating disused schools, and OUR growing community of children in Lasalle is faced with losing the only viable space into which our current elementary schools could possibly expand.

However you look at it, this equation just doesn’t seem to balance. English school boards have been down this road before to disastrous effect (as with the closing of Vivian Graham elementary school on Ile Perrot). Why are the commissioners of the LBPSB so short sighted and why are they selling our children short?