With more portables slated for Moncton High School, parents demand better solution

The increase in portable classrooms to accommodate the growing number of students at Moncton High School has been "a gradual thing," said Angela Harris, a member of the parents' committee at the school.

The new Moncton High opened in 2015 and Harris says concerns about overcrowding started being raised by parents in 2020, according to the minutes of the parent school support committee meetings.

Now, she and Susie MacDow, another committee member, say with 12 portable classrooms at the school and four more slated to be added in the coming months, the provincial government and the school district need to come up with a better solution.

"Are we going to have 30 portables out there at some point?" Harris wonders.

Moncton High School's portable classrooms are connected to the main building via hallways. (Submitted by Campbell Harris )

Harris and MacDow say students can't all fit in the cafeteria at once so the school has two separate lunch breaks, and they say they have safety concerns about evacuating the school with hallways "insanely crowded" between classes.

"My daughter says you could never stop and talk to your friend in the hallway — you just have to keep going with the flow," said MacDow.

"It is not a real solution."

Building new schools 'takes time'

A spokesperson for the Anglophone East School District confirms that Moncton High School was designed to accommodate 1,230 students but is 30 per cent over capacity, with 1,600 students currently enrolled.

Susie MacDow (back, right) says her daughter Jane studies in a portable classroom at Moncton High School. Her daughters Layla and Jude and son Baxter will be attending the school in future. (Submitted by Susie MacDow)

Stephanie Patterson said in an email that every portable is "connected to the school building via hallways" and that longer-term solutions are coming.

"We have a K-12 school in Shediac Cape which will take pressure off of Moncton High School along with a K-12 school in Dieppe which will take pressure off of MHS when they open," she said.

Patterson said those new schools should move about 800 students off the Moncton High campus, "however, that takes time."

Anglophone East superintendent Randy MacLean was not available for an interview, but will attend the next parent school support committee meeting and make a presentation to members about "enrolment pressures at MHS."

'We're getting louder'

Harris's son is in Grade 10 this year, and she has a second child who will start high school in the fall of 2025.

She says new schools in Shediac Cape and Dieppe are good news, but students and teachers can't go on with the current situation for the two to five years it will take to build them.

Angela Harris's son Campbell studies in a portable classroom at Moncton High School. (Submitted by Angela Harris)

"There's going to be a safety incident — this is my prediction," Harris said.

"Something bad is going to happen and then finally … they're going to say, 'OK, alright, now we better do something about this.'"

MacDow has one child attending Moncton High School and three more set to attend between now and 2030.

She suggests the district look at boundary changes that would shift some of the students currently at Moncton High to one of the other high schools in the city.

"Lewisville Middle School, which is a feeder school to Moncton High, is 12 kilometres from Moncton High but it's eight kilometres to Harrison Trimble [High School], so it made me wonder, are there some boundary changes that could be made, too?"

Inside view of a portable classroom at Moncton High School. (Submitted by Susie MacDow)

MacDow also points to the old Moncton High building in downtown Moncton that still has "basketball nets and a bus lane."

"Maybe we need to think outside of the box."

While both parents commend the staff and teachers at Moncton High for everything they do to make the school day run smoothly, Harris said parents are getting frustrated and are "getting louder" and have been contacting the education minister and their local MLAs.

"We can't wait for someone else to do something or to say something," she said.

"We've expressed our concerns in the schools through the [parents' committee] but it feels like it's going on deaf ears."