Town looks to help house students

Jasper Jr/Sr. High School students might find themselves displaced if the Grande Yellowhead Regional Division No. 35 (GYRD) School Board tears down their current home to make way for a new school.

The possibility resurfaced after a meeting between the school board and the Town of Jasper on Tuesday April 28, which was held to discuss the feedback from the Jasper community after last February’s meeting about GYRD’s request for a land swap.

The proposed swap would see GYRD use the current dog park as the new site for the school and then give the municipality the land the school currently sits on in return.

According to John Stitzenberger, chair of GYRD, despite the board formally requesting the municipality to investigate possible solutions for housing the students temporarily, they have not withdrawn their request for a landswap nor have they ruled out any of the other possibilities, which include building the new school on current GYRD land.

The board and the municipality seem to have agreed that, if there is somewhere to house the students, rebuilding on the current location is the best solution.

Jasper Mayor Richard Ireland said he thought the feedback from the community wanted the municipality to “look first at building on existing school property and if it wasn’t possible, then consider alternative sites.”

“The best place for the school is where it is now,” said Stitzenberger, “the problem we run into there is where do we put the kids?”

“The Alberta government has already told us that they don’t have enough portables for us to put kids in,” he said, adding there is a three-year waiting period for portables and the board isn’t prepared to wait that long.

Charged with looking after the children’s best interests, Stitzenberger admitted that the prospect of moving the children from the current school during the construction is a concern.

“The best place for the kids to go to school while a new school is built is in the old school, there is no doubt about it,” he said, adding that “there is a lot of different voices in the community, so it’s very easy for me to come forward and say this is the best one for the kids, period.”

According to Ireland, who is still waiting for an administrative report on the absolute possibilities they could offer GYRD, the municipality is happy to offer the use of the bowling green or other land for portables.

“We’re looking at ways that we could facilitate their continued operation in such a way that they could in fact just rebuild on the site that they’re presently on and they would be content with that,” said Ireland.

“We could potentially provide space in the kitchen at the multi-purpose hall so they could still do home economic classes, [or] the multi-purpose hall for gym classes and stuff like that,” he said.