Kennebecasis Valley parents hope for temporary French school by 2009

After a positive meeting with the District 1 Education Council on Monday night, parents pushing for a French school in the Kennebacasis Valley are hoping to have a temporary one in place by September 2009.

Marc Mathurin said his best-case scenario would have a temporary school offering kindergarten and some early elementary grades for the next school year. Mathurin said a temporary school would help bridge the gap in services until a full school could be constructed.

The closest French school for kids in the Kennebecasis Valley is École Samuel de Champlain in Saint John. Mathurin said there are more than 150 students from the region busing to Saint John for kindergarten to Grade 5 and he believes that is more than enough to warrant a school.

"It's important to the [local francophone] community," Mathurin said. "We talk about distance, we talk about community, but it is about us having a school in our area that is closer-by, we have the population for it and we need it."

Eventually Mathurin said there would be a need to add daycare services to a complex similar to the Centre Communautaire Sainte-Anne in Fredericton where a daycare, elementary school and high school are on the same site.

Michelle Robichaud, another parent fighting for the new school, said the area's only francophone school in Saint John is already overcrowded and too far away for children from the valley.

"If you look at the kindergarten classes this year, 38 kids out of the 64 are from the valley and so we know that there's a need and all these five-year-old young children are travelling on buses or going in with their parents and spending up to an hour, sometimes an hour and a half on a bus," she said.

Commuting to Saint John is proving very difficult for some kids. For instance, Mathurin said the province now pays for a taxi to bring one child who lives in Sussex to Saint John each day.

There are other kids who spend close to 90 minutes each way and so students and parents tend not to be interested in extra-curricular events.

"They don't get back home until 4:30 and they're pretty tired," he said.

Mathurin says the rise in students requesting access to a French school is due to an influx of parents from northern New Brunswick wanting to work in Saint John. But another factor that has emerged, he said, is the reforms to the early French immersion program.

Mathurin said some parents who would normally have sent their children to early French immersion at a local English school are now choosing to enrol their kids in a French school. Now that the province's French immersion program starts in Grade 3 instead of Grade 1, Mathurin said he knows of parents who want to their kids learning their language earlier so they don't lose their own language.

Mathurin said it's important that the school gets established quickly to ensure that kids have the opportunity to be schooled in the language of their choice, which is their right.

"There are some kids [of francophone parents] who don't speak French anymore. We don't want that to keep happening," he said. "We want to bring the community closer together."