New Waterdown Elementary School Boundary Review

The boundary review needs to include Millgrove. The only school in this area not included at this time.Millgrove goes to grade 5, and the Millgrove students are then bussed down to Greensville (Dundas) for three years. Transitions are difficult the anxiety itself is a lot. While Greensville and Millgrove do try to do an introduction in the grade 5 year it is still a very hard transition. There will be another transition to high school. These students are being moved to Dundas for three critical, impactful years where the friends they make may be from the Dundas Area and therefore are not friends they would continue on with for high school. Our students come back to Flamborough to attend Waterdown high, again reintegrating back into the community….in Grade 9…..which is hard enough.Picking our kids up from school is quite the drive as well. It is time we have to spend commuting to Dundas when they have extra curricular activities or appointments. Picking up from our community is much easier and less time for everyone. Additionally these students spend 1.5 to 2 hours on a bus daily. This time would be much better spent at home learning or spending time with their families. Our children’s mental health is important, and travelling great lengths for school, dissolving friendships on the way to grade 9 are a few of the important reasons we should keep them in Flamborough.Every effort should be made to keep our children in Flamborough and so including Millgrove in the boundary review at this time is critical.

If there is another fulsome Flamborough schools boundary review happening, Millgrove Elementary should be included in that review. I think many of the parents, students, faculty and community writ large would agree that Millgrove students should remain within the Flamborough community for Grades 6–8 rather than being sent to Greensville in Dundas. The current model separates Millgrove kids from their peers after grade 8, creates long daily bus rides, and disrupts social connections that are important during middle school years. A more logical and community-based solution would be to send Millgrove students to Flamborough Centre for 6-8, which is just five minutes away. This would keep Flamborough children together through to Waterdown High, reduce travel time, and make better use of available space in an undersubscribed school. Millgrove families are deeply connected to Flamborough — our kids play sports, volunteer, and build friendships here. Their schooling should reflect that same sense of community continuity. A better focus in this review would be to review the greater Waterdown schools together (Mary Hopkins, Guy Brown, Allan A Greenleaf, and new east Waterdown school) while also reviewing how to restructure the boundaries around the rural schools at large (Balaclava, Flamborough Centre, and Millgrove). As the board reviews boundaries and growth pressures in Waterdown, please consider including Millgrove in the solution to ensure our students stay within their own community.

This is an important opportunity to take a look at the enrollment issues at Flamborough Centre and Balaclava, where the younger grades are very undersubscribed at FC (only 3 SK kids currently, and a class of 16 JK/SK). The space at FC could be better used to serve and relieve schools that are oversubscribed from Waterdown - whether through supporting more of the French program or being a designated middle school - including solving the problem of the Millgrove kids currently having to travel all the way down to Dundas and be with peers who won't even be at the same high school during these formative social relationship years.

Millgrove school kids should join FC or Balaclava instead, and the younger grades at FC should amalgamate up to Balaclava. A permanent boundary stretch down through Concession 6 or 7 to send kids up to Balaclava would help shift rural families to amenities in the more rural area of Carlisle that would be inaccessible due to lack of practicality for Waterdown residents to travel or bus that far. FC is more accessible and space should be permanently saved for residents and growth that continues to happen in the main city - more houses are still being developed and room should be saved in the schools that are going to need it - very little growth is happening in the more northern/rural sections of this boundary review. Balaclava can take a bit more weight from the rural areas of all the concessions to preserve space in the more accessible schools to the main city of Waterdown.