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St. Lazare begins process to find a home for new English school

Parents still worried project will be stymied

Karen Seidman
The Gazette
Monday, February 8, 2010

Despite the positive step taken recently by St. Lazare city council to begin the process to rezone land under consideration for a new English-language school, parents in the off-island area are still skeptical that the project has made any significant progress.
“Until I see something concrete, this is just semantics,” said Roch Gamache, a spokesperson for an ad hoc committee of parents working for a new school and a former chairperson of the Pierre Elliott Trudeau elementary school governing board.
Gamache said the new resolution has produced no positive outcome that he can see and no one even knows if the four sites in question are the same ones that have been under discussion for many months.
“You don’t need a resolution to negotiate, you need concrete action,” he said.
But St. Lazare Mayor Pierre Kary and Lester B. Pearson School Board chairperson Marcus Tabachnick both viewed the resolution adopted last week as a step in the right direction.
“This is the first step in rezoning so this is proactive,” said Kary, whose election campaign last November hinged at least in part on a promise to rectify the issue of a badly-needed new English school in the flourishing off-island community.
He said a site for the Pearson board could be finalized as early as this month. The council is looking at rezoning four properties, keeping in mind that the Commission Scolaire des Trois Lacs has also asked for a new primary school and Pearson may need to expand further in the future.
“We are moving forward, so this is positive,” said Kary. “We were given a mandate to work with the school commissions so we are acting according to our mandate.”
Tabachnick said even if the city needs three months of consultation on a new site, it will give the board enough time to get the school built for Sept. 2011, which is the new target date. The school was originally scheduled to open in September 2010; the board got the green light for a new $8.4-million school two years ago, but hasn’t been able to find the right land for it.
“It takes a year or less to build, so 17 months is ample time,” said Tabachnick. “We are very pleased to see some real action taken.”
He said the fact that the city is looking at four sites “is good news for further expansion.”
But Gamache said parents are extremely frustrated with the lack of leadership on the issue.
“Why are we at the same stage as two years ago?” he asked. “There’s no real reason the due diligence for the land issue wasn’t resolve much earlier.”
He said parents were further frustrated by the board’ dismissal of land offered by Vaudreuil for reasons that he said were not made clear.
However, the board - which is prohibited from buying land and must have it donated - has also been frustrated by the host of inappropriate properties that have been offered up, including land with no sewage or roads, land next to high-voltage power lines, land below street level and land with streams that would have to be diverted because they pose a security risk to students.
The bottom line, said Tabachnick, is that the board wants to do whatever it can to get the project completed.
“It’s critical to get the school built now,” he said. “Some of the locations (under consideration) look quite good, but we’ll make any location work.”