The bell sounded for the first time Tuesday at St. Andre Bessette Catholic Secondary School.
It’s a brand new school, but like any school on this day across the city, there was both excitement and nerves.
“I’m very excited to be here. There's a lot of chaos going on, but we're all happy and it's just fun figuring it out together,” says Madison Berrisfort, as students gathered for a historic group photo.
“It’s weird being in a new school where everyone is excited and it's also weird cause, like I'm really new to high school. So just being in classes with everybody was really fun and exciting,” says Tana Meredith.
The $24-million institution is state of the art and can boast being the first fully wired school in London. It has learning modes that are natural to today's tech generation.
“There are smart-boards in every classroom and their goal, I think, by the end of Grade 12, is to be a paperless school, so it's going to be really nice,” says Sean Easter.
Enrollment for the new school is at about one-third capacity. It’s built for 1,100; however, it only has 331 students. But housing is booming in the area so there should be no shortage of families who want to send their children to the school.
Principal Peter Cassidy says the new school will take a lot of pressure off area secondary schools includeing; Mother Teresa, St. Thomas Aquinas and John Paul II.
"The ministry commissioned this school because, despite the fact that there are fewer kids going to school in this board and the province generally, we were at 130 per cent occupancy in the London high schools.”
