Students enjoying move to university

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/05/2011 (5439 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Kirkcaldy Heights School Grade 4 student Reece Teetaert says he has never had to walk so far just to get to gym class.

Teetaert and nearly 400 other students from the North Hill school are all getting bit more exercise while moving from class to class at Brandon University these days, after being evacuated from their school building just north of the Riverbank Discovery Centre on Monday due to the threat of flooding from the nearby Assiniboine River.

The youngster told the Sun on Friday he was blown away by the size of the university campus.

"It’s much bigger and different than our regular classrooms," he said of his temporary digs at BU. "I thought the gym would be in our building, but it’s all in different buildings. The gym’s across from us and the music room on the other side of the campus."

Teetaert’s classmate, Jasmine Ramsay, says she knows evacuating the school was the safe thing to do and is starting to settle back into her regular routine.

"The first day, it was definitely hard to focus," she said. "But it’s been cool for a new experience and just to learn more about the university."

The school’s Grade 3-8 students have fanned out in classrooms on the first and second floors of BU’s Brody science building, while K-3 students are spending their days in the university’s education building.

Recess times and lunch hours have been reduced to ensure that instructional time in the classroom isn’t affected by the division’s modified bus routes and Kirkcaldy’s temporary 2:35 p.m dismissal.

Principal Bruce Shamray says since classes began at BU on Wednesday morning, the novelty of being on a university campus has been enough to distract students from the seriousness of the evacuation from their school.

"It’s new and novel, so they’re all excited about looking through telescopes and seeing the flood from the roof and just being at an institution that’s this big and that’s just really interesting for them," Shamray said.

"We had one students in Grade 4 comment that they’d gone from Grade 4 straight to university and they hadn’t really even learned fractions yet.

But the levity of the situation threatening the city is certainly not lost on the school community, as 10 of Kirkcaldy’s students are actually residential evacuees themselves, he noted.

"We have additional supports of counsellors and social workers in place, if they see a need," he said. "In some ways, I think it’s kind of a bit of a reprieve from the issue about whether the water’s going to come into their homes. For a few hours, this is a place they can be where they know they are safe and secure."

Shamray said they’re working on the assumption that they will remain in their makeshift school until at least the Victoria Day long weekend, but will have to see what next week’s flood forecasts bring.

Brandon University’s dean of science, Austin Gulliver, says they are more than happy to be able to help out by providing the school with a temporary home.

Because the university’s spring session sees far fewer students on campus than normal, there are literally more public school students than post-secondary students in the Brody building right now.

"Classes have ended, exams have finished and we have not yet moved into our Mini-U mode," he said. "We’re pleased we’ve been able to accommodate them so easily and, I hope, successfully."