An alternate schooling arrangement SA国际影视传媒� known as the Storefront SA国际影视传媒� has come to an end at Diamond Jenness Secondary School.
The Storefront was first established in the fall of 2009 as a way to offer education to young people who for one reason or another did not fit into the regular school system and to adults seeking to upgrade their education.
However, Diamond Jenness principal Lynne Beck explained the Storefront is no longer being offered for two reasons SA国际影视传媒� a reduction in overall funding to Diamond Jenness and a declining number of students for the Storefront.
There was no specific funding for the Storefront. Rather, Diamond Jenness itself supported it from its overall funding.
Beck said the funding for Diamond Jenness is based on student enrolment.
"So when our student enrolment goes down, so does our funding," she said. "And unfortunately we've been losing families from the community. So when families leave, kids leave and the fewer students we have, the fewer dollars we get from the government to operate yearly."
Last year, there were 226 students at Diamond Jenness. There is no final count as of yet for this year's enrolment.
Beck said, when she started working at Diamond Jenness, the enrolment was sometimes more than 400 students.
The principal said it had become a struggle for the school to support the Storefront.
"And financially we just could not continue," she said, although she could not put a dollar figure on how much the Storefront cost to operate.
Beck explained that's because most of the support was allocating teacher time.
"We were investing resources from the school into it," she said. "And the other thing that started to happen was we had fewer people from the community coming in and needing the program."
Kim King, a program co-ordinator at Diamond Jenness who oversaw the Storefront, noted that last year, it started out with about 20 to 25 students, but by the end of the year only one student was occasionally attending.
"As a whole, they come, they enroll, but life just takes them in a different direction and they just don't seem to get it completed," she said.
For this year, no one had enrolled at the Storefront, and King had only received one enquiry over Facebook, although she was not sure if the person was seriously interested in attending.
Despite the current lack of interest in the Storefront, King believes it was a success.
"We've actually graduated several students," she noted. "A lot of students have gotten courses that they've needed over the years to go on to post-secondary. I think we've just run out of customers."
Beck also believes the Storefront accomplished its purpose.
"It kind of came to an end because it was so successful," she said.
"Looking at the numbers of people who were utilizing Storefront, we simply could not take part of our resources and put it towards a program that really seemed to have been used up," she added. "Anyone who needed it got it, and used it to get those couple of courses that they needed to graduate. For people who have very few high school credits, that just wasn't an option and that's kind of what we were getting down to."
Beck noted that students who may have been considering attending the Storefront can look to the Aurora College Community Learning Centre.
In the beginning, the Storefront operated in space on the ground floor of the high-rise, but for the past several years it was offered at the Diamond Jenness trades centre, which is separate from the main school building.
