The Alberta Parents’ Union is fighting the Calgary Board of Education’s proposal to close a building which houses the Louise Dean Centre, a school program for pregnant teens and young mothers.
If adopted, the proposal would close the Kensington building and relocate the program to Jack James High School in Forest Lawn, located in southeast Calgary.
Alberta Parents’ Union executive director Jeff Park says Forest Lawn has some of the highest crime rates in Calgary and isn’t safe for young, pregnant women.
“The entire idea of this program is that these ladies get bullied and harassed and too often subjected to violence in regular schools,” Park told True North.
“We need an innovative separate way of providing these educational services to (these women) because they shouldn’t have to choose between their child and their education.”
According to Data Enthusiast, the residential area of Forest Lawn had 2,875 counts of crime from January 2017 to July 2022. That includes 657 counts of non-domestic assault, 208 counts of non-domestic violence and 118 counts of street crime.
In Calgary’s all-crime category, Forest Lawn was surpassed only by Beltline and the Downtown Commercial Core.The Kensington building is located in northwest Calgary and offers on-site child care, life skills programs and other critical supports to help pregnant teenagers and young mothers graduate.
The site currently has 47 students. In a statement to True North, the Calgary Board of Education said Kensington was constructed in 1947 and requires an investment of approximately $17 million in maintenance and facility infrastructure. The problems are mechanical systems and the “building envelope that have exceeded their designed life expectancy.”
“Any work required on these major systems would require temporary relocation of the school during work, thereby increasing costs and displacing the students and their children.”
Modification designs proposed for Jack James High School total a one time investment of $5.6 million, the spokesperson said. The money would fund dedicated learning spaces for the program, additional child-minding space to accommodate the students’ children and partner office space. The Calgary Board of Education also claims students would benefit from increased access to education and co-parenting of expectant and parenting fathers.
Alberta Parents’ Union is a fiscally conservative organization which believes taxpayers’ money must be respected so that “when truly dire compassionate circumstances like this come up, so that you can afford to make the right decision,” Park said.
He also said the board is arguing that declining enrollment has caused Kensington to fall below the provincial standard of 85% utilization. Meanwhile, 46 other schools in the district are below 70% utilization, he said.
“They’ve started this process with about 20 of those 46 schools, but the priorities here are so out of whack,” he said.
As part of the Board of Trustees’ Closure of Schools Procedure process, the board is accepting questions and written submissions until Tuesday, Nov. 22.It’s also holding a virtual meeting on November 1 to hear public input.
