By Richard Leitner, News Staff

Six schools in lower Stoney Creek are set to undergo a closure review in the fall of next year as the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board tries to cut 5,000 empty classroom seats over the next five years.

Despite some doubts about whether they will be able to stick to the schedule and avoid overlapping elections, trustees on Monday approved a staff plan for 14 accommodation reviews, or ARCs, that will include 80 of the board’s 95 elementary schools.

Ellen Warling, manager of planning and accommodation, said the first four reviews planned for this fall target school clusters with the largest number of empty seats. Two of them have about 1,000 more than needed.

The six Stoney Creek schools – Collegiate Avenue, Eastdale, Green Acres, Memorial, Mountain View and R.L. Hyslop – meanwhile have about 240 surplus spaces, although enrolment varies widely.

Warling said including several schools in a review allows for greater public input and the chance to develop as many accommodation solutions as possible.

“We want to really emphasize, because we included so many of our schools, that inclusion in an ARC does not mean that the school is slated for closure,” she said.

West Mountain trustee Wes Hicks said the ARC schedule is the first time the board has laid out its intentions over a five-year period and he believes doing so encourages people to become involved early in the process.

He said the plan’s guiding principles, including on optimal school capacities, property sizes and grade organization, address past criticisms that reviews are piecemeal and change rules as they go along.

“Here it is. It’s all laid out,” Hicks said. “The calls that I’ve had since this has become a public document is, ‘For the first time we can see ahead, we can see what’s coming.’”

Ward 5 trustee Todd White said he agrees the schedule proceeds “in a reasonable, logical order,” even if it may be unrealistic to complete all 14 reviews in five years.

But he said he’s concerned the repair needs of schools left out of the reviews may get short shrift because the ARC strategy will develop five-year renewal and maintenance plans for schools that survive closure studies.

Dundas trustee Jessica Brennan had the opposite concern – that repair needs at schools in an ARC might be ignored, an apparent reference to Parkside High School, scheduled to close next year.

“I do have to go, personally, to my community, where there was, some of us might argue, a sense that a particular school might close in the future, so we wouldn’t spend any money on it,” she said.

“I just want to know what it is that we have in place so we don’t do that again.”

Senior facilities officer Dan Del Bianco said schools not in an ARC will still get funding from annual provincial repair grants and a long-term master plan has been developed to set guidelines for all expenditures given limited resources.

“Having lived through the secondary accommodation reviews, I think it’s very important to be absolutely transparent as to why we invested in schools, what we did at those schools and why we did it at those schools,” he said.

“I think that was a large component that caused a lot of angst amongst the (review) committee members.”

Sir Isaac Brock is also slated for a closure review in the fall of 2015 that also includes Elizabeth Bagshaw, Glen Brae, Glen Echo, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier.

The schools have a combined surplus of 639 pupil spaces, with most of those at Bagshaw and Laurier – 316 and 257, respectively. Brock has just 23.

No upper Stoney Creek schools are on the ARC list, although a boundary review of Gatestone and Mount Albion catchment areas is scheduled to proceed this year to accommodate growth in the area, including at Penny Lane Estates, across the road from the Taro dump.

The board also plans to buy land for another elementary school in upper Stoney Creek or east Glanbrook this year.