Quebec City's South Shore will soon have its 1st English school

On a sunny spring morning, the workers up on the girders are in T-shirts at a construction site on Quebec City's South Shore. The sound of their drills is music to the ears of Benoît Sévigny, architect and head of buildings for the Central Québec School Board (CQSB).

Planning for the first English elementary school in Lévis, Que., began in 2019, with the opening originally scheduled for this fall. But the pandemic caused unforeseen delays.

"If we wanted to finish, we had to start," Sévigny says. "So that's what we did."

The opening of New Liverpool Elementary School is now slated for March 2024.

Years in the making

CQSB chair Stephen Burke first heard the idea of a South Shore school floated back when the board was created in 1998. He was a new commissioner at the time.

Talks with the Education Ministry about a new high school in Quebec City turned to the idea of opening that school on the Sainte-Foy property where St. Vincent Elementary School now sits, and building a new elementary school in Lévis.

Burke says the idea made sense, given that more than half of the students at St. Vincent are busing across the bridges daily from the South Shore. The new school in Lévis will mean a huge change in that daily routine.

"They're saving at least 30 minutes to an hour a day," Burke says. "Count that five days a week, 210 days a year, that's a lot of time."

Retaining neighbourhood heritage

The school is in a quiet residential neighbourhood in the Saint-Romuald sector of Lévis. It was once a hamlet called New Liverpool, known for its lumber and shipbuilding trades, which attracted workers from the British Isles to the shores of the St. Lawrence.

The property came with a 25-metre-tall pyramid, a local landmark that was once a Catholic church.

Knowing how important the structure, nicknamed "the gem," was to the community, it became the obvious place for the school's gym.

Sévigny's team is excited by the opportunity to build the CQSB's first school in decades. The challenge was to make their ideas work within the budget of just under $30 million.

"The kids should be able to participate in something that just elevates them a bit," he says.

Its classrooms are larger than St. Vincent's, which was built in 1956, and there's more room on the schoolyard. The main entrance opens on to an agora-style space with wide wooden staircase-style seating, where students will be encouraged to sit and work.

"The idea is to give them different ways to learn, different places to learn," says Sévigny.

There are currently 300 students enrolled for the 2023-24 school year at New Liverpool. About 160 St. Vincent students who live on the north shore will be enrolled in other CQSB elementary schools in Quebec City.

"Change is never that easy," Burke says of some parents' concerns that those students may have to make new friends. "But we've made it so the kids can look forward to it."

Burke says there's room for growth at New Liverpool. The CQSB is hopeful that some families in Lévis with the right to send their kids to English school will now choose to, given the new local facility.

"For some parents, it's kind of difficult to put a young boy or girl on a bus [driving] many kilometres away," he says. "We had no solution for it. Now, we do."