Infrastructure Study of Sackville Schools Now in the Hands of the District Education Council
And now… we wait.
This was the outcome of the Anglophone-East School District Education Council meeting held in Moncton on June 20th. Members of the Sackville Schools 2020 movement attended the last meeting of the year to hear about the status of the infrastructure review of our Sackville schools. You will recall that the group presented to the District Education Council back in January, when the DEC decided to allocate funds to contract Ernst and Young, a Moncton-based accounting and consulting firm, to conduct the review. Now, five months later, the review has been submitted to the School District Superintendent and he delivered it to the elected members of the DEC last Tuesday.
According to the Chair of the Committee, Mr. Harry Doyle, the members will need the summer to read the report and they will discuss it amongst themselves at the next regular meeting of the DEC on September 19th. Sackville Schools 2020 group members asked for a timeline and the possibility of the DEC sharing the contents of the report, yet were told that we will need to be patient and wait for a public discussion on the report that will be held in the new school year, likely in October. Committee members Craig Evans and Jo-Anne Simmonds addressed the members of the DEC to assure them that Sackville Schools 2020 has devoted two years to this project and we are anxious to move forward with the new model we have put forward to them.
Marshview Middle School, built 70 years ago, was originally the Sackville High School. Below are photos from Marshview (Top row: art hallway, boys change room, cafeteria; Middle row: hallway, hallway, library; Bottom row: playground, new tech lab, tech lab)
Cooperation, patience, research and continued communication of our ideas will continue over the summer and we will keep the community up-to-date on any new information that comes our way. While this lull in our work is frustrating, we remain committed to working with members of the community, the DEC, the Premier, and the Department of Education in creating a new vision for education in our community.
“While this lull in our work is frustrating, we remain committed to working with members of the community, the DEC, the Premier, and the Department of Education in creating a new vision for education in our community”