Wild Rose School Division

Rocky Mountain House Community Engagement

February 17, 2022

Wild Rose School Division will be hosting a virtual community engagement session on February 17, 2022 from 7:00 pm to 8:00 pm. At this meeting, the Board of Trustees and senior administration will be sharing information regarding the division’s capital plans for École Rocky Elementary School and Lochearn Elementary School. Both of these buildings are getting to the place where they will need to be modernized and while this is probably still a few years away, we need to start putting a plan together now. 

One potential idea that the Board is considering, is to ask Alberta Education to build us one new elementary school in Rocky Mountain House rather than modernizing both elementary schools. This may be attractive to the province in terms of overall cost and efficiencies as well as improving our overall utilization rates in our Rocky Mountain House schools.

Our current utilization rates are as follows:

• École Rocky Elementary - 42%
• Lochearn Elementary - 72%
• Pioneer Middle School - 52%
• West Central High School - 58%
• Overall Utilization for Rocky - 55%

Past experience has shown us that the government is more likely to approve capital plans that improve efficiencies and increase utilization rates. Alberta Education wants to see utilization rates of 90%.

This plan would require some grade realignment in our Rocky schools. Possible scenarios include:

• Scenario 1
• Build a new K-3
• Pioneer - grade 4-8
• WCHS - grade 9-12
• Scenario 2
• Build a new K-4
• Pioneer - grade 5-8
• WCHS - grade 9-12
• Scenario 3
• Build a new K-3
• Pioneer - grade 4-7
• WCHS - grade 8-12

This virtual meeting will give the community an opportunity to provide feedback and ask questions. As such, in preparation for this meeting we are inviting interested community members to use the following form to submit questions ahead of time. We will be accepting questions using this form until February 7, 2022. If time permits, we will also take additional questions during the meeting on February 17.

Thank you in advance for your interest in this capital planning process to provide modernized school facilities in Rocky Mountain House that are efficient, well utilized and effective in terms of being able to support 21st century learning.

Please use the following Google Meet link to take part in this meeting on February 17 starting at 7:00pm:

Google Meeting Link:  meet.google.com/pmq-axwm-mrn

Please submit any questions using this link.