Montreal City Weblog

Kate 13:29 on 2020-02-27 Permalink Reply  

• Ian 15:05 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  I know this is kind of the implied story here, but is the reason (or a reason) we now have a school shortage that the city has been suppressing building new schools? If so, well then by heck I’m all for expropriation. It’s not like the city was ever adverse to expropriating from citizens if they were standing in the way of “progress”.

• Dhomas 18:36 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  Meanwhile, nothing is being done to alleviate the shortage of teachers. We’ll have nice, shiny new school buildings with no one to teach in them!

• Ian 19:13 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  Oh something’s being done alright, they are banning the ones with hijabs. /s

  It’s going to be a few years before enough students cycle through to meet the needs for teachers especially after everyone was told for decades not to become a teacher as there were no jobs.In the meantime, standards for teachers form other places are being conditionally lowered to meet demand. Teachers from Ontario used to not be permitted to teach in QC because of ERC and QC history but that restriction is a lot more flexible as long as they meet the French requirement.

• Kate 19:17 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  Ian, from the 1960s throughout the 80s birth rates dropped drastically in Quebec and school buildings were repurposed for other things. There’s a big old school on Marie-Anne that was turned into condos, as was D’Arcy McGee on Pine Avenue. Luke Callaghan school near St Michael’s in the Mile End became office spaces – I worked there briefly on a friend’s project a few years ago in what had been a classroom – and Baron Byng on St‑Urbain was the headquarters of Sun Youth for decades. A lot of schools became low-rent office spaces for social aid organizations of one sort of another. I’ve been to a tenants’ meeting in the old school building opposite Holy Family church in Villeray, for example, also in an ex-classroom.

  Some of these are reversible: the CSDM clawed back Baron Byng and has turfed out a lot of the organizations using others, although the ones that have been sold for condos probably can’t be taken back. But there’s also the fact that these old school buildings are not in good shape. They’ve torn down several elegant old school buildings and put up new ones in Villeray and Hochelaga and probably elsewhere. Even if they weren’t all gunged up with dust and mold, the old buildings mostly aren’t accessible in the modern sense – they’re full of stairs – and adding modern cabling, gender-free bathrooms and so forth would be difficult. Easier and cheaper to tear down and rebuild.

  None of this can be blamed on the city.

  The only news story about land for schools that I’ve been aware of since doing this blog was the Nuns’ Island one, where the school board wanted to put a school on park land, and the borough said no. I imagine we’ll see a lot more of that. Most of this city is built up now and nobody will want to put a school on postindustrial brown land.

• Ian 19:26 on 2020-02-28 Permalink

  I am aware of that sordid history of neglect, but the part my ears perked up at was the idea that somehow there were a ton of schools being proposed that the city was blocking.

  My kids used to go to FACE which is looking for a new home as their current building is under renovation. There was talk of renovating another space, maybe the old hospital, but the CSDM decided they wanted to double down and use the grant money for renovations on a CSDM property. Some have speculated that’s why they took back Baron Byng, though it’s still unclear.

  That in combination with all the recent kerfuffle about English schools being taken over and redistributed to French school boards got me thinking “why is there such a dire shortage of space” and I always assumed it was because of neglect but now i seems like maybe there’s another factor, and indeed sometimes it is less expensive to simply build a new facility than to reclaim and retrofit an existing one.

  I’d love to see what is going on behind the scenes in this, or at least get a glimpse at some of the studies that led the province to think cities are somehow blocking new school construction to the point that this legislation is the solution to something.

• Kevin 23:38 on 2020-02-29 Permalink

  Where families live has changed immensely. Back in the 70s-90s families moved to new developments in the West Island. Those kids have grown up and now have families off-island, so West Island schools are shrinking, while there are fewer kids in the West Island. Last I heard my old high school has half the population it did 30 years ago.