Starting in 2020, the Environmental School will expand to include grades 8 and 9.
The proposal was approved at Wednesday’s school board meeting and will see the school expanded to include one additional class of 23 students across the two grades, increasing enrolment to 108 students.
Currently, the school has 85 students enrolled from Kindergarten to Grade 7 and around 50 on a waiting list.
Environmental School administrator Randy Bates said that the waiting list is actually closer to 70 to 80 students.
The Environmental School is a public school that meets all the requirements of the School Act, but learning is based on place-based, imaginative and ecological education at local parks, non-profit centres, school grounds and buildings, gardens and farms, restaurants and government offices.
Teaching and learning involves “reconnecting the natural and human worlds,” according to the school’s website.
The plan is to offer Grade 8 in September 2019, then include Grade 9 the following year.
Bates is planning to be at the school board meeting this evening, hoping for approval.
“My superintendent wants it to happen, I want it to happen, I have lots of people who are very excited to be a part of our school, but I can’t put in there yet,” said Bates.
Environmental school staff have partnered with those at Thomas Haney secondary for grades 8 and 9 students to access some curricular and extra-curricular programming. Upon completion of the Grade 9 level, graduating students would be offered Thomas Haney as the catchment school from grades 10 to 12.
“At the moment, we have ideas of how we want it to go, but I can’t say this is what’s going to happen because I don’t know yet,” said Bates.
“If we are down at Allco Park, my students are down there studying the salmon, the watershed, the forest, the mushrooms that are growing so well this winter,” noted Bates, adding that students could access some of the technology at THSS.
Bates anticipates that Thomas Haney will be getting around 15 Grade 9 graduates from the Environmental School entering into their Grade 10 program.
But numbers are not an issue.
“There is more wiggle room when you get into Grade 9 or 10 than there is in Grade 8,” said Bates.
“With any school, kids will start there but there will be a certain number of them that will move to another high school in grades 9 or 10, just because of the way of whether they fit in here or if another school offers a program that they are after,” he added.
This expansion, he said, would give him some more space to add a few more students into the school.
