French Catholic board demands to province: ‘Give us our school’

The message from Hamilton's French Catholic school board leaders is clear: we want our own school.

The Conseil Scolaire de District Catholique Centre-Sud (CSDCCS) held a student assembly and news conference on Tuesday at É​cole secondaire Académie catholique Mère-Teresa, the aging East Mountain school it desperately wants to replace.

The board rejected the province's latest offer of $26 million to build a new high school that would be shared with the French public board last week. The board wants some $23 million to build a new school at 16 Broughton Ave.

'We're losing many of our students to other systems, and that's a huge loss to the Francophone culture in this community.'- Melinda Chartrand, CSDCCS Chair

The board is also moving forward with a lawsuit filed against the province just over a year ago that argues the government's refusal to fund a new school violates the charter rights of students.

Mark Power, the board's lawyer, said the lawsuit could go before a judge soon.

"We have the numbers, give us our school," said Mélanie Morissette, the parent council president of a Brantford, Ont. French Catholic elementary.

"There's no need to have a shared partnership."

Representatives from the French Catholic school board and the Mere-Teresa Secondary parents council laid out their case for a new high school at a news conference in the school's gym on Thursday afternoon. (John Rieti/CBC)

CSDCCS Chair Melinda Chartrand said parents throughout the region support the decision to keep pushing for a purely French Catholic school. In addition to space concerns — Chartrand says her numbers show a 500-person school would be at capacity in two years — preserving the school's culture is a key issue.

"We celebrate a lot of different events. When you're in a shared facility you kind of lose that management, that flexibility, to have those type of events," Chartrand said.

Mixed schools, she's said, just don't work for students and school staff.

The school's culture, Chartrand said, "gets so diluted that we're losing many of our students to other systems, and that's a huge loss to the Francophone culture in this community."

More than 200 parents recently attended a meeting in Hamilton to voice their opposition to a partnership.

Still, as Radio-Canada has reported, those kind of partnerships do exist elsewhere in the GTA including in Toronto where École Saint-Frère-André (a CSDCCS school) and West Toronto Collegiate (run by the Toronto District School Board) share a building.

Chartrand said what's happening in Hamilton is a "completely different" situation because it's the only French Catholic school in the region.

Chartrand said the conditions at Mere-Teresa remain "embarrassing."

The school was originally intended to be an elementary school. Today, it's home to around 330 high school students and lacks many of the amenities of other high schools in the city.

"This is unacceptable," said Nancy Baverstock, president of Mere-Teresa's parent council.

When Chartrand asked the students lining the gym bleachers if they would like a new school, there was a loud and unanimous "yes" reply.

One question that came up repeatedly was how many French Catholic students there are in Hamilton and the surrounding region. (Mere-Teresa also houses students from Brant, Norfolk and other nearby areas.)

Chartrand said there would be more French Catholic high school students if they had a better facility to attend. She said the board believes there are over 1,200 Francophone Catholics in Hamilton alone who could be in the school if it was in better condition.

In the meantime, the CSDCCS is asking parents who support the creation of a new, French Catholic high school to Tweet their demands using the hashtag #ActionACMT.

CBC Hamilton has asked the Education Ministry for a comment about its decision to offer the $26 million in funding only to a partnership of boards.

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