Keswick neighbourhood school considers enrolment lottery amid population growth

Parents who live near Joey Moss School in south Edmonton are concerned about whether their kids will be able to attend the newly built school.

Some parents in a newly built area of a south Edmonton community may need to play the lottery, with the prize being their kids’ attendance at the nearest school.

Lauren Canniff, who lives in the Keswick neighbourhood, said many parents are surprised to learn their kids might not have a guaranteed spot at Joey Moss School after recent population growth in the area.

Joey Moss is a kindergarten to Grade 9 public school on 182 Street that opened in 2022.

“There is a specific area of Keswick that is being built right now that people move into, and they assume that they’re zoned for the school, and they’re not,” she told CTV News Edmonton on Thursday.

Canniff added the school was built to address a lack of nearby spaces to send kids as families moved in.

“Now we finally have a school, but the community expands so rapidly it doesn’t actually have room for everyone in the community,” she said, estimating that Joey Moss alone has around 1,100 current students.

“It’s bursting. We go to pick up our kids and it is busy and crowded and the traffic is crazy, and that’s even with six new modulars that have been built or that opened this year.”

The Edmonton Public School Board (EPSB) said while attendance areas haven’t changed for Joey Moss, it has been moved from a Level 2 to Level 3 school on the board’s Growth Control Model. This means if the number of students living in an attendance area exceeds planned class space, a lottery process would be introduced to manage growth.

“It’s important to note that it’s possible that a school at Level 3 will not necessarily need to use the lottery process,” read an emailed statement from EPSB.

“The lottery process helps manage enrollment growth without changing the attendance area. It also helps ensure as many families as possible can attend a school close to home.”

Mayor Andrew Knack said both newer neighbourhoods are seeing these sorts of challenges as families move into areas they think will have space for their school-aged children, while other mature neighbourhoods across Edmonton may even see low enrollment.

“We actually did see some mature schools in mature neighbourhoods close down over the last decade because there weren’t enough kids in those spaces,” he told CTV News Edmonton at an unrelated city hall event on Thursday.

And continuing to build new schools in new neighbourhoods, he said, can be tricky.

“The city has to operate within our boundaries, but even within our existing boundaries, we have to be thoughtful about how we do that growth,” he explained. “Because it’s just adding more cost to the provincial government to build more schools.”

Joey Moss is one of 11 schools considering a lottery should student pre-enrolment numbers get too high. A lottery process would not affect existing students.

A statement from ministry of education and childcare press secretary Garrett Koehler said the province was investing $8.6 billion to build and renovate more than 130 schools across Alberta, and that more school projects for Edmonton would be announced in “the near future.”

With files from CTV News Edmonton’s Connor Hogg