F.A.C.E. School

By Dan Laxer
The Suburban

The English Montreal School Board has tabled a motion to help save F.A.C.E. School. The arts core education school serving both Anglophone and Francophone elementary and high school students is facing an existential crisis after the CAQ government went back on its promise to fund urgently-needed renovations, thereby keeping it open.

Instead, the education ministry announced last month that the planned renovations to the heritage building have become too costly. The work was originally estimated at $243 million. But the government says the actual costs have risen to $375 million. As reported in The Suburban last month, the government has opted, instead, to separate the elementary school and high school, and house them in two different locations – École Christophe Colomb and École Saint-Urbain.

With the school’s fate all but decided, the EMSB has tabled a motion at the April 29 Board of Commissioners, “calling on the government to keep F.A.C.E. school.” The motion was tabled by EMSB Chairman Joe Ortona and by Ward 4 commissioner Maria Corsi, who commented at the meeting that “the F.A.C.E School community, both on the CSSDM side and the EMSB side, was blindsided” by the ministry of education.”

Ortona agrees. “While we were well aware that the F.A.C.E. building is in need of significant renovations, the possibility of this building closing as a school permanently was never raised,” Ortona said, calling the ministry’s decision “disgraceful” and “shameful.”

“For the Minister to just announce this late on a Friday afternoon (April 4) left everyone with more questions than answers,” Ortona added. “The Minister has an obligation to consult, even in the French sector. It’s a disregard of our rights.”

The decision to withdraw funding for the renovations, Corsi said, essentially spells “the end of the highly successful and unique F.A.C.E. School cohabitation model and program.” Corsi points out that the government made its decision without consulting the communities that will be affected.

Corsi highlighted, as did Geneviève Gueritaud, a mom of F.A.C.E. students who spoke with The Suburban last month, that the locations proposed by the government are inappropriate to F.A.C.E. School’s arts-core education. They don’t have the facilities required, or the space, to accommodate its arts-core curriculum.

The motion is calling on the government to consider alternatives to the rehabilitation project that would “reduce costs to allow F.A.C.E. School to return to its current location without impacting the safety and security of students and staff.”

The motion also suggests as an alternative, if retaining the current F.A.C.E. location is rejected, the site of the former St. Raphael School at 8735 Henri Julien “for the construction of a new, state-of-the-art facility specifically designed for the arts, to house elementary and high school students of the CSSDM and the EMSB together.”

F.A.C.E. is the only school in the city that houses students from both the CSSDM and the EMSB. The CSSDM owns and manages the building.

If the government’s decision stands, Corsi argued, future students will no longer have access to the educational benefits and advantages of F.A.C.E. School’s cohabitation model. “It is incorrect and disingenuous,” she says, “for the minister to say that the F.A.C.E. program would remain the same in two separate buildings. So, it’s imperative, and the school community expects, and in fact demands, that the minster reconsider this decision, and that the costs of the F.A.C.E renovation project be reevaluated and that all options be considered to ensure the integrity of the program, and that the students remain together in one building.”

The motion was passed unanimously. n