Education
Kentwood and area residents invited to hear details about new 700 student Catholic Middle School
From Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools
RDCRS connects with residents in the Kentwood neighbourhood about St. Lorenzo Ruiz Middle School
Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools has been provided funding for the construction of a new middle school in The City of Red Deer. St. Lorenzo Ruiz Middle School will be located in the neighbourhood of Kentwood. The location of the new school was selected to support current and future student populations in the community.
“The Division’s middle schools in Red Deer are currently operating at over 120 per cent capacity and we expect continued enrolment growth,” said Board Chair, Kim Pasula at Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools.
“Families and young people in our region continue to choose Catholic education. Over the last 10 years, enrolment in our Division has increased by 50 per cent and today well over 10,000 children are attending our schools.”
Work has begun on the design of the school, with preliminary geotechnical testing completed in early 2021 to understand site conditions.
“The new St. Lorenzo Ruiz Middle School will bring a $25 million infrastructure project to our community. The new school will help to alleviate the overcrowding in our existing schools and create new educational and amenity opportunities for the young people and families that live in the surrounding neighborhoods. We look forward to sharing more about the project and hearing from community members at the upcoming online meeting, the first in a series of planned engagement sessions,” says Pasula.
To keep residents informed on the progress, the Division is holding a community engagement session on Tuesday, April 6 at 5:00 p.m. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this meeting will be held virtually via Zoom. The intent of this engagement session is to provide a forum for community feedback and an opportunity to voice concerns with the overall design of the school. This first engagement session will focus primarily on the site layout.
Dear Kentwood residents,
As you may be aware, Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools has been provided funding for the construction of a new middle school in the City of Red Deer. The school site in your community has been chosen for the location of the new school, St. Lorenzo Ruiz Middle School. The location of the new school was selected to support current and future student populations in the community
Interested attendees can join the Zoom meeting link (Meeting ID: 950 5484 1129 and Passcode: i2RDy0).
St. Lorenzo Ruiz Middle School features:
● The school will be a two-storey design to accommodate 700 middle school students.
● The school is planned to follow a traditional school year and will operate as a closed
campus.
● The school site will provide parking lots to staff and visitors, with a potential student
drop-off lane within the visitor parking lot.
● The current playground and skating rink will be retained on-site, and the retention pond
will not be altered.
● Additional playground space is intended to be installed, including a proposed basketball
pad.
● Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools will provide an opportunity for user groups to rent the
facility after-hours and on weekends.
● Construction is expected to start late fall of 2021, with the school opening September
2023.
For more information, please visit https://www.stlorenzoschool.ca/.
Red Deer
Judge upholds sanctions against Red Deer Catholic school trustee who opposed LGBT agenda
From LifeSiteNews
Monique LaGrange was ousted last December from the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools’ board for comparing the LGBT agenda targeting children to brainwashing.
A Canadian judge ruled that a school board was justified to place harsh sanctions on a Catholic school trustee forced out of her position because she opposed extreme gender ideology and refused to undergo LGBT “sensitivity” training.
Justice Cheryl Arcand-Kootenay of the Court of King’s Bench of Alberta ruled Thursday that the Red Deer Catholic Regional Schools (RDCRS) Board’s sanctions placed against former trustee Monique LaGrange will stand.
LaGrange had vowed to fight the school board in court, and it remains to be seen if she can take any further actions after the decision by Judge Arcand-Kootenay.
The judge ruled that the RDCRS’s policies in place for all trustees, which the board contended were breached, were “logical, thorough, and grounded in the facts that were before the Board at the time of their deliberations.”
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the RDCRS board voted 3-1 last December to disqualify LaGrange after she compared the LGBT agenda targeting kids with that of “brainwashing” Nazi propaganda. As a result of being voted out, LaGrange later resigned from her position.
The former school board trustee initially came under fire in September 2023 when she posted an image showing kids in Nazi Germany waving swastika flags during a parade to social media, with the bottom of the post showing an image of kids waving LGBT “Pride” flags along with the text: “Brainwashing is brainwashing.”
After her post went viral, calls for her to step down grew from leftist Alberta politicians and others. This culminated in her removal as director of the Alberta Catholic School Trustees’ Association (ACSTA).
In September 2023, the RDCRS passed a motion to mandate that LaGrange undergo “LGBTQ+” and holocaust “sensitivity” training for her social media post.
LaGrange, however, refused to apologize for the meme or undergo “sensitivity” training.
She had argued that the RDCRS had no right to issue sanctions against her because they were not based on the Education Act or code of conduct. Arcand-Kootenay did not agree with her, saying code of conduct violations allow for multiple sanctions to be placed against those who violate them.
Education
‘Grade inflation’ gives students false sense of their academic abilities
From the Fraser Institute
The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Suppose you’re scheduled for major heart surgery. Shortly before your surgery begins, you check into your surgeon’s background and are pleased to discover your surgeon had a 100 per cent average throughout medical school. But then you learn that every student at the same medical school received 100 per cent in their courses, too. Now you probably don’t feel quite as confident in your surgeon.
This is the ugly reality of “grade inflation” where the achievements of everyone, including the most outstanding students, are thrown into question. Fortunately, grade inflation is (currently) rare in medical schools. But in high schools, it’s a growing problem.
In fact, grade inflation is so prevalent in Ontario high schools that the University of Waterloo’s undergraduate engineering program uses an adjustment factor when evaluating student applications—for example, Waterloo might consider a 95 per cent average from one school the equivalent of an 85 per cent average from another school.
Grade inflation is a problem in other provinces as well. The average entrance grade at the University of British Columbia is now 87 per cent, up from 70 per cent only 20 years ago. While this is partly because the supply of available university spots has not kept pace with growing demand, it’s also likely that some B.C. high schools are inflating their students’ grades.
Sadly, grade inflation is so rampant these days that some school administrators don’t even try to hide it. For example, earlier this year all students at St. Maximilian Kolbe Catholic High School in Aurora, Ontario, received perfect marks on their midterm exams in two biology courses and one business course—not because these students had mastered these subjects but because the York Catholic District School Board had been unable to find a permanent teacher at this school.
The fact that a school board would use grade inflation to compensate for inadequate instruction in high school tells us everything we need to know about the abysmal academic standards in many schools across Canada.
And make no mistake, student academic performance is declining. According to results from the Programme for International Assessment (PISA), math scores across Canada declined from 532 points in 2003 to 497 points in 2022 (PISA equates 20 points to one grade level). In other words, Canadian students are nearly two years behind on their math skills then they were 20 years ago. While their high school marks are going up, their actual performance is going down.
And that’s the rub—far from correcting a problem, grade inflation makes the problem much worse. Students with inflated grades get a false sense of their academic abilities—then experience a rude shock when they discover they aren’t prepared for post-secondary education. (According to research by economists Ross Finnie and Felice Martinello, students with the highest high school averages usually experience the largest drop in grades in university). Consequently, many end up dropping out.
Grade inflation even hurts students who go on to be academically successful because they suffer the indignity of having their legitimate achievements thrown into doubt by the inflated grades of other students. If we want marks to have meaning, we must end the practise of grade inflation. We do our students no favours when we give them marks they don’t really deserve.
Just as our confidence in a surgeon would go down if we found out that every student from the same medical school had a 100 per cent average, so we should also question the value of diplomas from high schools where grade inflation is rampant.
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