'Tipping point': Edmonton high schools bursting at the seams

School boards expectEdmonton high school classrooms will reach their limits within the next four years, as schools adapt to a growing student population with building extensions, multi-use classroom spaces and online learning tools.

Four Edmonton high schools are already considered over-capacity and half of Edmonton high schools are at 94 per cent capacity or above, based on 2018 enrolment numbers.

Edmonton's public and Catholic school districts predict that all their high schools will be full by 2022.

"I've seen classes in gymnasiums, I've seen classes using the stage or learning commons or the library," said Michelle Draper, chair of the public school board.

Over the last two years, seven new Catholic schools and 13 new public schools have opened, but none of those new buildings have been senior high schools.The top request on the Edmonton public board capital plan is a new high school in the Meadows area of southeast Edmonton.

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In Mill Woods, J. Percy Page High School is at 108 per cent capacity and Holy Trinity, the Catholic high school on the same site, is at 119 per cent capacity.

Holy Trinity is currently undergoing modernization, but still won't have enough room for students when the project is complete.

"We predictthat as soon as that modernization is complete that they'd be at capacity if not over," said JohnFiacco, assistant superintendent of educational planning for Edmonton Catholic.

Edmonton Catholic hasrequested a high school at the Heritage Valley site as part of its capital plan. Fiacco said he hopes it will ease some of the space concerns in Mill Woods, but those plans are still waiting on approval from the province.

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"These are all hopes and dreams without infrastructure money," he said.

Edmonton's largest high school feeling the crunch

Harry AinlayHigh School, across the Whitemud from Southgate Centre, is the largest high school in Edmonton.

With around 2,600students enrolled, it is at 96 per cent capacity andit added 200 students to its population in the last year alone.

Nour Abdelhakim, a Grade 11 student at Harry Ainlay, said there are challenges to having so many students in one building.

"There tends to be lineups to the washrooms, that's why you get off class and run to the closest bathroom as fast as you can," Abdelhakim said.

In between classes, the hallways are full.

Principal Gane Olsen said moving from class to class was even more difficult for students last year, after flooding forced staff to close the central hub in the centre of the building while repairs were underway.

"Corners of our rotunda would take minutes to get through," Olsen said.

Since it reopened, students can cut across the middle to get to class more quickly, he said, but it can be tricky at times.

To ease some of the congestion, the school added a new hallway through the centre of the cafeteria area in 2016, leaving 300 seats at the cafeteria tables.

High schools adapting to size constraints

Harry Ainlay is one of many high schools in Edmonton that have modernized to allow more students to attend.

"Administrators are very creative and very proactive," said Fiacco.

Some schools, he said, have taken a computer lab and made it a multi-use room during other periods. Insome cases schools have had to use classroom space in adjoining junior high school buildings for senior high students.

Draper, the public school board chair,said building a new high school costs about $79 million.

That's almost three times as costly as the average elementary school, but the high school would accommodateonly about twice as many students.

Administrators are very creative and very proactive.- John Fiacco,Edmonton Catholic Schoolassistant superintendent

But Draper said expansions can only do so much before new schools need to be built to deal with a growing population.

"There is a tipping point where it becomes more expensive to upgrade and modernize bring that building up to 21st-century learning and it would make more sense to build a new structure," she said.