Superintendent Mike Borgfjord

There has been a spike in student numbers in the Seine River School Division this fall.  Superintendent Mike Borgfjord says each year they expect growth.  "Anywhere from 1.5 to 2%.  We knew our enrolment was going to be up a fair bit by our bus transportation.  The number of students riding buses has gone up significantly more than usual."

He notes the early numbers after the first few days in school show a strong increase.  "It looks like we are up 112 students and that may go up or down a little bit.  That is a big growth of 3% for our division and it puts some pressures on our schools when the numbers go up that high."

Borgfjord says adding more teachers is something they will look at.  "We made a couple of adjustments already this year because of enrolment growth.  We added half a teacher for kindergarten at Ste Anne Immersion and increased a teacher to full time at Ile des Chenes.  It's something we continue to monitor.  We want to try and keep class sizes as small as possible so we look at what dollars we have and try to do the best of it."

He speculates on some of the reasons for growth.  "Lorette has had a lot of construction over the summer between apartments and housing construction so we continue to see growth in those areas.  For the most part most of our schools stayed pretty stable.  But in the Lorette area the numbers went up in all three of our schools."

Borgfjord adds Ste Anne Elementary and La Broquerie saw nice increases as well and thinks this growth will continue.  "Especially in the La Broquerie area we always see numbers pop up as the year goes on so I wouldn't be surprised to see that population grow between now and the end of June.  We do know there is still construction happening in lots of our communities."