Rapid growth in the Town of Penhold continues to place space pressures on the schools in the community.
 
Chinook's Edge School Division is pleased the province has approved some modular classrooms for Jessie Duncan School to provide some extra classroom space.
 
As Superintendent Kurt Sacher explains, along with the addition of relocatable classrooms, they'll also be tweaking the grade configuration at two of their Penhold Schools “4 relocatables to be attached to Jessie Duncan School, what it will do is allow us to keep the Grade 1’s that are currently there this year as they move into Grade 2 next year, so Jessie Duncan will become a pre-K to grade 2 school. One of our schools where there is a real pressure point is Penhold Elementary School and it will move from being a 2-5 to a grade 3-5, and Penhold Crossing will continue to be a 6-12 school”.
 
Sacher says by moving the Grade 2's to Jessie Duncan school, they'll gain 4 more classrooms at Penhold Elementary.
 
Long term, Sacher says they'll need to look at a solution for Penhold Crossing “right now the bulge is in the elementary and as they make their way into the secondary grade levels we’ll have other challenges to deal with and we’ll need to look at the grade configuration of Penhold Crossing. It won’t be sustainable over time for Penhold Crossing to be a 6-12, it was originally designed to be a 7-12”.

Currently nearly 170 students are studying at Jessie Duncan, just over 275 at Penhold Elementary and nearly 330 students at Penhold Crossing.