THUNDER BAY – It looks like Aurores Boréales’ satellite secondary school will start the next school year with twice the enrolment it had a year earlier.
When it started last September, the French-language Catholic high school program for Northwestern Ontario students outside Thunder Bay had two students, both in Dryden.
One student joined them during the school year to bring enrolment to three students who will be returning in September, and now a student in Nakina is set to join the innovative program.
Eric Gauthier, principal of the ESC des Satellites, concedes the raw numbers are small but says the innovative program’s growth is another success story for what has always been an innovative school board.
The Conseil scolaire de district catholique des Aurores boréales operates 10 French-language elementary schools in a territory stretching from Red Lake to Marathon but has just one brick-and-mortar secondary school, ESC de La Vérendrye in Thunder Bay.
The board’s young students outside the Thunder Bay area had no options to continue with French Catholic schooling after Grade 8 – until the creation of a unique satellite high school program that allows Grades 9-12 students to attend classes at Aurores Boréales school buildings in smaller municipalities.
Gauthier, in an interview with Newswatch, said the satellite school functioned in the 2024-25 school year as “a mini high school within those walls of” École catholique de l’Enfant-Jésus in Dryden.
There is an education assistant on site and a teacher based in Thunder Bay, he said.
Unlike in the home-based learning of the COVID pandemic, he said, “our students are actually in a school setting.”
There are “occasions where our teacher will travel and go spend some time with her students to do some hands-on activities, and we also will bring the students here to Thunder Bay for different outings,” he adds.
One such outing was the recent launch of a hand-made canoe by students from ESC de La Vérendrye and the satellite school, Gauthier said.
“We’re trying to be very creative on how we can work with the students,” he said.
The satellite school’s newest student will report for classes at Notre Dame des Écoles in Nakina.
