Dear Parents and Staff of Holy Spirit Academy and Notre Dame Collegiate: Christ the Redeemer is committed to having Holy Spirit Academy and Notre Dame Collegiate operational for September 2013. This will take considerable effort, but we have the full support of our facilities staff, our contractors and Alberta Education. We have learned that Holy Spirit Academy cannot be restored and ready for occupancy during the 2013/2014 school year. We have learned that Notre Dame Collegiate will be restored and ready for occupancy in December or January of the 2013/2014 school year. As a result, we have had to make some agonizing decisions that will inconvenience and upset many of our stakeholders. There is no easy way to say it, we are selecting the best plan from a host of dozens of plans we’ve considered, and all these plans require sacrifice and create upheaval. We believe we have selected the least disruptive plan that ensures students are in good learning environments as soon as the next school year begins. There is speculation in the community that Holy Spirit will need to be demolished. I must emphasize this is premature speculation and it is certainly not based on the analysis that has been done to date. CRCS’s insurers have enlisted a number of experts who are assessing all aspects of water damage. This analysis will continue as access to the site is made available. The preliminary material gathered to date is positive. The current expectation is that the repair operations will be significant, yet these are expected to fall well short of complete demolition of the site. All experts enlisted currently agree that the final path for repair operations will allow for Holy Spirit to be fully ready for occupancy in the 2014-2015 school year. To reiterate, initial material gathered to date is positive, but more analysis needs to be done to provide definitive information. More information will be provided on the status of Holy Spirit as it becomes available via email and website updates. Plans for Holy Spirit Academy We plan to locate all of Holy Spirit Academy’s students in portables on the school site of Notre Dame Collegiate. We expect these portables will be linked together. The portables are new units that exceed the quality of most classrooms across the province. Holy Spirit’s students will have access to the gymnasium of Notre Dame Collegiate which should be ready in September, yet the rest of the school is unavailable due to restoration efforts. When Notre Dame is ready to be reoccupied, the Notre Dame students will return from the location described below and the administration of Holy Spirit and Notre Dame will work together to intelligently share core spaces in the restored facility as required. The portables on site will, of course, remain in use by the students of Holy Spirit. Plans for Notre Dame Collegiate We plan to locate all of Notre Dame Collegiate’s students in a self-contained wing of Senator Riley School in High River for 4 or 5 months. In addition, we will add 14 portables to Senator Riley. These portables will simply extend a long hallway of the Senator Riley wing that will be reserved for our use. As a result, our school will consist of 19 classrooms situated on both sides of one unbroken hallway. Because the wing will be entirely for our use, we will be able to permeate the school with faith as we would, for the most part, in our own facility. The portables are new units that exceed the quality of most classrooms across the province. Notre Dame students will get their instruction from their Notre Dame teachers. We will provide complementary course offerings to the best of our ability and have access to Senator Riley’s gym, music room, foods lab, and construction lab. When Notre Dame is ready to be reoccupied in December or January, we will move the students back to their fully restored facility and resume second semester as planned. We offer our heartfelt thanks to Superintendent Denise Rose and Foothills School Division for this offer of space and we also offer thanks to Education Minister, Jeff Johnson, who helped facilitate this arrangement. We also offer our thanks to Avi Habinksi, from Alberta Education’s Capital Planning Division, and Randy Clarke, our Alberta Education Zone Director, for their tireless efforts and advocacy on our behalf. There will be many questions you all have and we will do our best to predict what they are and provide regular updates on our progress throughout the summer. We need to develop programming and make hundreds of other decisions over the next few weeks, so we appreciate your patience and trust. The CRCS family continues to hold the community of High River up in our prayers, and we will do our best to make this temporary situation as acceptable as possible. Sincerely, Scott Morrison Superintendent
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 00:29:19 +0000
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