A catchment review will get underway this week in the Quesnel School District.
This will eventually determine which schools students living in certain areas will be eligible to go to.
Superintendent Dan Lowndes says they decided to do a review after the District got the go ahead for the new Carson Elementary School which will have the space for roughly 100 more students.
“Part of the awarding of the school was to look at the overcrowding in our southern schools in particular, so schools like Ecole Red Bluff Lhtako, Dragon Lake Elementary, Lakeview School and then of course Carson itself. So those will be where we start, but then also knowing that our catchment lines between Carson Elementary and Riverview Elementary for example, they border each other, so that might be something under review.”
Lowndes says all of that has to be determined though.
He says nothing will happen right away.
“There will be opportunity for community consultation because it is something that is important to families in our community. And then as decisions are made, there is no intention of doing this in a disruptive way. It might take a couple of years for sort of the migration to fully occur.”
Lowndes says they have already been receiving calls asking if students can go to the new Carson school however.
He says there are exceptions when it comes to catchment areas.
“Yes there are always exceptions. We have a process in policy for out of catchment students to be able to attend a school that is not in their catchment. Students can follow that process and they can potentially attend that school as long as there is space, and we have that as a pretty regular occurrence especially early in September.”
Carson elementary was awarded to the School District by the province as a replacement for the current Carson, which experienced a catastrophic landslide back in 2021.
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