Moncton school hires staff to walk students from portables

The Anglophone East School District has hired extra staff to walk students from their portable classrooms to Moncton's Northrop Frye School for bathroom breaks and other activities over safety concerns.

Northrop Frye School is facing an overcrowding problem this year.

The district has brought in six portable classrooms to ease the overcrowding issue.

But Tamara Nichol, the chair of the district education council for Anglophone East, said that solution has created another conflict.

"The link to the school is built and ready, however, the fire doors and hardware that goes with that are not installed yet, so that means the children, by order of the fire marshal, are not able to use the link to the school at this time," Nichol said.

Nichol said three extra staff have been temporarily hired to walk the students safely to the school for bathroom breaks and other activities. The link is expected to open later this week.

The K-8 school opened in 2011 and has 672 students, according to its website.

She says the interruption in the day is difficult for children, who thrive on consistency, and calls the situation "not the most ideal."

"There's some instructional time I'm sure taken up dealing with these types of things."

Northrop Frye's DEC indicated to the provincial government before the school was built in 2011 that it wasn't going to be big enough to serve the area, and it isn't the only Moncton school feeling the pressure of too many students.

Evergreen Park is facing similar overcrowding issues and Nichol says there is already an indication that Riverview East will be overcrowded within a couple of years after opening in 2014.

"We really should be listening to the people in the areas, in the districts, on the ground, dealing with the specific schools and I think sometimes at the department level they don't always listen well... they have their guidelines that they follow and sometimes there's a disconnect between the districts and the department," Nichol said.

School boundary report coming Wednesday

On Wednesday, the Anglophone East District Education Council will release results of a review that has examined the boundaries of nine area schools.

Northrop Frye, Evergreen Park, Magnetic Hill, Birchmount, Beaverbrook, Queen Elizabeth, Edith Cavell, Hillcrest and Bessborough schools are all part of the boundary study.

Nichol said Ernst & Young looked at everything from boundary changes, to grade configurations, to new buildings in the study which will make recommendations on how to redistribute students.     

"Really, you can't look at one school and make a decision. You need to look at the area that the schools are in, whether they're rural or urban, it doesn't matter," she said.

"As far as you know, how you decide to best distribute students or whether you need to build new buildings, all of those things need to be taken into consideration before any real decisions can be made."

Any of the consultant's recommendations made in the study will then go to Gregg Ingersoll, the district superintendent.

Nichol calls the study "in-depth" and says the third-party report is unbiased and she thinks it is likely that the DEC will follow the recommendation.

"It doesn't really make sense not to," she said.

Members of the public will be able to respond to the report and share their feedback via the district website until October 9 with a final decision being made on October 13.

The report will be made public on Wednesday night at 7 p.m. at Bernice MacNaughton High School.