20 February, 2012
Mr Jody Carr
Minister of Education
Fredericton, NB
Dear Mr Carr
It is time for you to re-consider the location you chose for the new English High School for Moncton. The Irishtown Road is too busy: a secondary road with poor single access that needs widening, sidewalks and a pedestrian crossing overhead to the Irishtown Nature Park ! As well, a proper exit from the Trans-Canada Highway needs to be developed onto Elmwood Drive since buses will have to turn left going East and that is impossible to do at 8:00 AM! Why are you bailing out a failed golf course development in the middle of a wind-blown cow pasture ?
Shawn Graham must be very grateful to you for building a new school for Kent County ! Moncton citizens are outraged that you will not renovate our school in the city. Have you reviewed the mistake they made in Saint John building the Milledgeville High School supposing that the city would grow in that direction? As you may know, people moved to Rothesay and Hampton and the new Milledgeville High School closed. Given the choice students continued to go to Saint John High (which is older than Moncton High) and refused to attend the out-of-the way “state-of-the-art” school. Only by destroying the much loved old building will you force students to go outside the city. You will find the other two Moncton schools overcrowded and needing to be replaced soon. Harrison Trimble is 50 years old – beyond its 30 year limit for a mid-century building, and MacNaughton had to be almost all re=built as it was sub-standard to begin with.
This ‘state of the art” school you plan to build would not be modeled after your alma mater Fredericton High School or Leo Hayes High School would it ? We don’t want those kind of problems here. Those campus schools of over 1200 students are too big, too impersonal and look at the bullying and troubles they have ! No high school should have more than 1000 students at the most.
What you should do is renovate Moncton High School. Use it as an Arts School for drama, music and art. Build a “crystal” in the quadrangle at Moncton high for the library and technology.
Build your “state of the art” high school for the commuters from Kent County if you like but keep it small. For Heaven’s sake don’t call it Moncton High School ! Give it a new name and let it develop its own traditions. The puns about the Purple Knights are not transferrable.
Sincerely yours,
Catherine Cox
MHS Alumna and former teacher-librarian
