The Greater Saskatoon Catholic School board is getting closer to building a new St. Frances Cree Bilingual School.

The current location of the school was outgrown and had to be split into two different schools. Between the two campuses there are approximately 650 students and 74 day care spots. A dramatic increase from around 30 students when the school opened.
The ministry recently allotted $250,000 for planning and to determine the scope of the project for the new site, which according to Gordon Martell Superintendent of GCSC has gone a long way already for the future of the school.

“In that time we’ve worked closely with our parent advisory committee , we’ve engaged an architect for a preliminary design, we’ve determined the location, we know the relative size of the school that we expect upon opening. We’ve consulted with the community, parents, as well as the broader community on a number of occasions.”

One of the committees met with was an Elder’s committee. With language and culture being of the upmost importance, a few months ago a full day of Elder consultation was held.
Martell says the Elders spoke of the school as a place of healing.

“As a place of reconciliation , as a place of ceremony, as a place of an opportunity that would extend to the land with land based learning opportunities . So they’ve really expanded our horizons of how they imagined the school to be.”

The location picked for the school will be Grosvenor Ave and 7th street, which offers an additional 2 acres for the school than the current site on McPherson Ave. This also allows the two schools to merge once again and be one larger community. Martell says that this year the next steps forward will be translating the ideas generated to a concept design. With a good deal of planning already done and a stakeholders conference already held, the school board hopes this will accelerate the time line when it comes to new budget, due out in March.