Whitehorse's F.H. Collins high school is over-capacity, 8 years after it was rebuilt

It's been less than a decade since the old F.H. Collins Secondary School building in Whitehorse was shut down in order to make way for a whole new building — and now the new building is already stretched at the seams.

The building's operational capacity is for 744 students, but as of earlier this week there were 783 students enrolled there. Twenty-eight of those students were physically attending class this semester at the Wood Street school.   

Linda Lammers, a schools superintendant with the education department, says the total enrolment number will fluctuate a bit, and had dropped to 773 as of Thursday morning. She also says they were expecting F.H. Collins to be at or near capacity this year.

"So knowing that we were broaching that line, we were definitely aware and putting things in place to work on addressing that," she said.

"A really key thing was making sure that this year we weren't accepting any out-of-catchment students."

Beyond this year, the school is expecting to have two portables added for the 2025-26 school year. 

According to the F.H. Collins school council, those portables were actually promised four years ago.

Council chair Sandra Henderson feels that the department has failed to plan appropriately for a growing population. 

"Our population has increased immensely over the last ten years," Henderson said. "It's very difficult to get data from the department [of education] and … very difficult to encourage them to search out data."  

Henderson, who's been on the school council since 2007, argues that the new F.H. Collins building, which opened in 2016, should have been bigger but that the government of the day was trying to keep costs down. 

"Students need space," she said.  

Ted Hupé, president of the Yukon Association of Education Professionals, says the old F.H. Collins building could accommodate up to 1,200 students. 

The new school building was designed after consultations with the community, he said, and some of the things that came out of that consultation "did not get included in the plan that they decided to go with."

"And so … a school that was much larger became a school that was smaller," he said. 

The catchment for the school includes Marsh Lake, Golden Horn, Cowley Creek, Mount Sima, Riverdale and downtown Whitehorse. And according to Hupé and Henderson, some students in that catchment area are on a waitlist to enrol at F.H. Collins. 

"They cannot accommodate some of the kids who actually live within the … area," said Hupé. 

According to Lammers, the superintendent, school officials at F.H. Collins have also raised the issue of how many students the school can reasonably accommodate.

"What they've brought to me is that, you know, they're concerned about the growth in this building. And so absolutely, we're, like I say, portables are coming for the next school year."