It’s time to do something about the old St. Mary’s Girls high school.

“We’ve gone through a seven-year process . . . a detailed analysis of all the options available to the school district,” says Catholic school board chairwoman Linda Blasetti.

School money comes from the provincial government, and the board doesn’t have the $8 million necessary to renovate the building for community use, add mechanical changes and meet the needs of the school program, she says.

Calgary Catholic School District
An artist's rendering of how St. Mary's will look after reconstruction.

Calgary city council will decide Monday whether or not to designate it a heritage building.

Dianne Abbott, secretary of the Society for the Preservation and Restoration of St. Mary’s School, points out that the 1909 building was the first purpose-built Catholic school in Alberta. It’s on the site of an earlier school, started in 1885 in a log cabin.

“When I went there in 1969, we were taught by the FCJs,” she says. (The Faithful Companions of Jesus are the religious order that was brought in by Bishop Vital Grandin to start the first Catholic schools. Father Albert Lacombe found them the site in the Catholic mission area.)

Calgary Catholic School District
The old St. Mary's Girls high school shortly after it was built.

The order’s convent is still next door, she notes.

The school has other links to Calgary’s history, she says. When it was put up, Senator Patrick Burns was on the Catholic school board. In those days, the Mission district was a recent addition to Calgary, having been outside the city limits as Rouleauville until a couple of years earlier. Old St. Mary’s is one of the last remaining buildings from the era.

“There is not a lot left in the Mission-Cliff Bungalow area to compare to it,” says Abbott.

The building could be used as an archives, a museum of education or the history of early French Calgary, or as a school.

She says Calgary Catholic could take the upgrading budget for the current St. Mary’s high school (the old St. Mary’s Boys) and the money allowed for the old St. Mary’s Girls and have both done as a unit.

Abbott says schools in Eastern Canada can be old structures with a sense of history and tradition behind them. To have your graduating class picture hanging with those of people who met the crises of 20th-century history would be inspiring.

“What a testament to the longevity of Catholic education,” she adds.

Blasetti says Calgary Catholic has an educational use for the site in a new building. It’s a program for special needs pupils who don’t function well in a regular class. They are kids with extreme therapeutic needs and the interior design won’t be the traditional classrooms off a hallway with a gym in the middle.

Woods Homes will offer therapeutic support and the school system will supply the academic necessities.

The program requires 26,000 sq. ft., and that’s how the government funded it – $3.8 million for a new school or equivalent, says Blasetti.

If the city designates the building a Category A heritage site, it would have to pay, not the school board – and the renovation being sought would cost more than $8 million.

Blasetti says the location is important because St. Monica’s elementary and junior high school is across the street, and St. Mary’s high school is a block and a half down the street.

Having kindergarten to Grade 12 in the area allows varying degrees of integration and moving toward integration. What about the pupil with the athletic ability for high school sports, but educational needs for a segregated, therapeutic setting? The idea is to have the optimum environment for a select group of kids.

The district has done due diligence on all the options and this is the best one, Blasetti says.

If city council designates St. Mary’s as a Category A heritage building, Calgary public should beware: it has 15 or 16 of the old sandstone schools that are more architecturally significant than St. Mary’s Girls.

“I have every respect for city council, but would hope that city council would have that same respect for us,” Blasetti adds.

St. Mary’s Girls high school is obviously more important than most old school buildings.

There are still a number of red brick buildings from the early 20th century in Calgary and some of them are quite pretty. I’ve tried to see it in the best light, but I can’t see the old St. Mary’s as one of them.

When all’s said and done, it’s time to move on. If the school is to be preserved, it would have to be not for the walls themselves, but for tradition lived inside them. Heritage is more than age. The heritage of St. Mary’s is a continuing ideal – it’s education in a tradition of faith, reason and civility that is best preserved in every classroom in the Catholic school system.

It is a tradition of raising good citizens and good Christians.

That is what drives Catholic education.

(Murdoch Macleod has a personal interest in this story as a supporter of Catholic education.)