Bishop Gainsbury
In the past ten years, enrollment at Seabury has increased by over 110%. Unsurprisingly, the same campus is no longer enough to accommodate the expanding student body. As a result, this fall an expansion of the Seabury campus was formally announced, to be completed in 2020. This will include giving every teacher his or her own classroom, improving the science facilities and conjoining the Main Building and Reese Hall into a single, larger building. Currently, the space between the buildings is occupied by the now defunct pool, so no resource space will be lost in the transition. Although these changes will improve the quality of student life, it comes at the cost of an entire year of construction. Students and faculty weighed in with a variety of opinions on the upcoming construction.
“At the board level, we had had conversations about inevitable growth, I think there have been smaller conversations for about five years about this, but it finally came to the point where we realized we needed to expand due to our growing enrollment,” says Headmaster Don Schawang regarding the board’s decision to expand the campus. With 224 students currently enrolled, the school is pushing the limits of the campus. As of right now, a number of teachers have to share rooms due to a limited number of classrooms, and the commons often gets overly crowded during lunch and morning meeting. The general consensus seems to be that a campus expansion is necessary:
“As the school is growing, we really need a bigger campus and we need more rooms to support all of the students,” says seventh grader David Klimiuk. However, Klimiuk states that the expansion is “maybe not [necessary] right now, but it would be a good thing to do sometime in the future.” As a seventh grader, Klimiuk stands to spend the entirety of his high school years with the new campus.
However, the benefits of the expansion do not come without a cost. For the entirety of the 2019-20 school year, the campus will be under construction. It is not yet certain what exactly this will mean for the student body of Bishop Seabury, but going to school on an active construction site will likely mean sacrificing some convenience in the next school year for an improved campus in years to come.
Regarding the inconvenience of the construction, faculty member Arnie Knudson, who has been at Seabury since its founding over 20 years ago, says, “I think it's like roads and everything else: if you're gonna fix it up you're gonna have to suffer for the time being. It's unlucky timing for this year’s eleventh grade, because they don't get any benefits; they just get the inconvenience, but it's got to happen to someone.”
As Knudson voiced, this year’s Juniors will graduate before the new campus is opened, so they will not be able to experience its benefits. “I’m not happy about it at all,” says junior Gabby Aubel. “Why does it have to be during my senior year, where I should just be hanging out, chillaxing, you know what I mean? Instead, I have to be in a place that is under construction, where people are gonna be all the time, it’s gonna smell gross and I don’t even get the senior lounge. I’m not happy about it.” Next year’s seniors will get a senior lounge, but it will be in a portable trailer instead of inside the main building. However, Aubel says she thinks “now is the best time, and if they didn’t do it now they should’ve done it like last year or maybe the year before just because so many new students are coming and we already have a couple classes that are overbooked.”
Over the course of Seabury’s lifespan, the school has been required to alter its campus to better accommodate its student body several times. From the change of campus in 2003 to the addition of Reese Hall, Seabury has been rapidly expanding over the course of the 21st century. Today, the school stands on the precipice of another expansion. In general, while the new campus certainly comes at a cost, it appears to be the general consensus that it is necessary for Seabury to continue to grow, both physically and intellectually. As Schawang says, “I tell the parents we need to do this so that the environment and the resources are equal to the ambitions and the skills of the students, and I really mean that.”
