It has to be said that we weren't responsible for managing francophone schools 30 years ago. There were 360 students at two francophone schools at the time. Ten years later, in 1994, there were 2,100 students attending 14 schools. Another 10 years later, there were 6,000 students attending 37 schools. Today, we have 45 schools for 9,000 students. If you consider that 67,000 students are eligible for instruction in French, we will need at least 100 or so schools 10 years from now.
You have to understand that people in a city like Edmonton want to send their children to a neighbourhood school. You say that your riding, where I also live, has five French-language schools, but each of them has a student pool possibly the size of 10 neighbourhoods, whereas parents actually want a neighbourhood school, a francophone school that's in their neighbourhood or within a radius of 10 kilometres or so.
The real problem for francophone school boards are the significant sums of money they have to allocate to school transportation due to the fact that there aren't enough schools. Consequently, over the next 10 years, we will definitely need another 100 or so francophone schools in Alberta. I imagine that many other provinces in Canada might have the same need.
Neighbourhood schools are therefore very important in offering services to the francophone population, and they must also be of a level of quality equivalent to that of anglophone schools. If the schools we wind up with are just schools that anglophones no longer want, that's really a problem.
For example, I replaced the principal of a school with 260 students from late February to late June. That school had been leased from an anglophone school board. The building had been constructed for students from grade 7 to 9, but I had students from grade 7 to 12. That'll give you an idea of the problems we experience in the schools.
In Alberta, we still have francophone schools that don't have a gymnasium or that can't offer certain programs, in the early childhood field, for example, because they don't have the necessary premises.