The Toronto Catholic District School board is set to consider the expansion of Mary Ward Catholic Secondary School to a nearby satellite campus to help ease its over-enrolment issues.
At the board's Jan. 26 meeting, Scarborough/North York Trustee John Del Grande put forth a motion to explore the possibility of creating a satellite campus at the nearby St. Maximilian Kolbe site - which was closed as an elementary school in June 2011 and is currently used as the Midland North Campus of Monsignor Fraser College - effective September 2012.
Located "just a stone's throw away," well within walking distance of Mary Ward, Del Grande said the St. Maximilian Kolbe site, at 100 Fundy Bay Blvd. in the Birchmount Road and McNicoll Avenue area, could be the perfect solution to Mary Ward's over-enrolment woes.
Located on Kennedy Road north of McNicoll Avenue, Mary Ward, he added, is currently operating at 136 per cent of its maximum capacity - due in large part to a lack of Catholic high school options in the north/central Scarborough area. Grade 9 enrolments and other grade transfer requests currently exceed available classroom space in the existing school building.
"(St. Maximilian Kolbe) is a school site that will fit perfectly for Mary Ward, would increase the capacity to students who want to go there, plus potentially bring new students," Del Grande said.
"Mary Ward was never meant to be a local school, it was meant to be a magnet school because it has a very unique program - one of only a few in Canada," he added.
That unique program - Direction 2000 - is one of only seven in Canada designed to adapt to various student schedules, learning paces and classroom environments.
"Founded in 1985, the school...offers a unique mode of curriculum delivery emphasizing individualized learning and self-paced progress," according to the Mary Ward website.
"The individualized learning is coupled with a unique and highly acclaimed teacher advisor-student program. A complete slate of academic programs is offered at all levels of study."
While trustees voted in favour of a feasibility study to consider the St. Maximilian site as a future satellite campus for Mary Ward, Toronto Trustee Jo-Ann Davis voiced her concerns over the displacement of Monsignor Fraser students such a decision would create.
"These are students that were in a storefront at a strip mall location before (moving to St. Maximilian)," she argued. "So if we are looking to displace Monsignor Fraser students from that location in order to assist Mary Ward, then I will definitely be against that as a proposal."