'Over the moon': Drummondville Elementary gets $13M for new school

French tutorials in the stairwell, library books shelved wherever space can be found, and lunch eaten at pupils' desks: That will all soon be in the past, now that English-language elementary students in Drummondville are getting a new school.

The MNA for Centre-du-Québec, André Lamontagne, announced Thursday that the Eastern Townships School Board will have access to more than $13 million for the construction of a brand-new building, as early as Monday.

"It was more relief than anything else," said Michael Murray, the chair of the Eastern Townships School Board. "We've been asking for this school for a long time."

Last year, the former Liberal government gave the board $6 million to expand, ruling it ineligible for a new building.

The board held out for a brand-new school, Murray arguing it would be "foolhardy" to delay until the board could prove the school was short four classrooms and had 125 children on a waiting list to enrol.

"The need is extremely evident," Murray reiterated Thursday. "We were optimistic that we would get approval but apprehensive that in the last ditch it wouldn't arrive. So this is great news — fabulous news — for the community."

"Our personnel will be over the moon."

35 new students in the fall

The school population of Drummondville Elementary has almost tripled in the last 20 years, from fewer than 100 students to more than 250, with 35 new students expected in the fall.

Most of the students francophones with the acquired right to go to school in English because their parents or grandparents did some of their elementary schooling in English a generation or two ago.

In recent years, the administration has had to make sacrifices to accommodate everyone.

The cafeteria was converted into classrooms — hence lunch served in the classroom. Pre-kindergarten classes are held in a church basement across the street from the school. The gym is tiny, and there's no music room, no science lab, no dedicated French classroom.

Murray said he is looking forward to bringing the school, which opened in 1999 in a building constructed in the 1950s, into the modern era.

"Older schools were never designed" for 21st-century learning, he said. "We can now start fresh instead of having to compromise our ambitions with an existing building or difficult modifications."

In all, the provincial government has earmarked nearly $62 million for school construction projects in the Drummondville region.

Diane Bourgeois, mayor of the small town of Saint-Lucien, east of Drummondville, gasped when she heard almost $10-million is destined for the French-language elementary school in her municipality.

As for the region's only English elementary school, Murray said he doesn't know how soon construction will start, but that he hopes to have shovels in the ground in the next few months.

He said the board had already started scoping out potential sites for the school, but the timeline for construction will depend on the availability of contractors.