The Quesnel School District has new catchment boundaries for the first time in decades.
The Board of Education approved them at Wednesday (Dec 17) night’s meeting.
Superintendent Dan Lowndes says four of the District’s schools will see fairly significant changes.
“The four schools, Carson Elementary of course being one of them with the most significant impact. The whole student population there would obviously move to the new building. Voyageur Elementary will see significant changes. Riverview Elementary will see significant changes as well as Dragon Lake Elementary. For the specifics on what that looks like I do recommend that people access out website. The new catchment maps are live on the website as well as links on our Facebook page. You can simply type in the address and find out exactly where your home will be in the catchment lines.”
Lakeview, Barlow Creek, Bouchie Lake, Ecole Red Bluff Lhtako, and Parkland elementary schools will see minor changes, and there will no change for Wells, Nazko and Kersley.
Lowndes says the District plans to hold community engagement sessions in the New Year on these changes, as well as sessions at the schools that are most impacted.
He says it was a fairly lengthy process to get to this point.
“We started this process back in December of 2024 knowing that because the new Carson build is definitely considerably bigger than the current Carson School. We needed to increase the enrollment base for the school. Yes, Carson started the process but it also allowed us to really look holistically at the whole district and really look at enrollment patterns and trying to really provide space in all of our elementary schools as best we could to try and balance out enrollment.”
Lowndes stresses that there will be no school closures as a result of this process, something that a lot of people have expressed concern about.
He adds that there will also still be a process for students to attend school outside their catchment area.
A new process for that was also passed at the Board meeting.
“We’ve always had what’s called a school of choice process, and that’s what has led to 20 percent of our elementary population being out of catchment, so really it is a similar process.”
Lowndes says the biggest change is around the timing.
“What we’re asking is that if you are impacted and you are currently attending a school outside of the catchment lines, we ask that you register at your catchment school, being step one. And then step two if you wanted to, lets say you’re a grade 6 student at Dragon Lake Elementary and you’re impacted by the catchment lines and your new catchment is Carson, we ask you to register at Carson. But at the same time you can do an out-of-catchment request to remain at Dragon Lake. We did hear a lot from the community about the importance of maintaining consistency with peers and with some great relationships they’ve made with the schools and the staff, so we wanted to make sure we could allow for that in this.”
The changes will go into effect for the 2026-27 school year.
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