New northwest Edmonton charter school aims to eliminate socio-economic opportunity barriers for students

A new charter school in north Edmonton aims to increase opportunities for socio-economically challenged elementary school students.

Thrive Elementary Charter School is being built on the site of the former Edmonton Menorah Academy, and is slated to open on budget and on schedule on Sept. 5.

As part of the requirements for Alberta charter schools, Thrive will enhance its kindergarten-to-Grade 6 curriculum with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pathways "as well as covering those barriers that families deal with every day in terms of getting their kids to school, feeding them and extracurricular activities," said Michael Hladun, vice-chair of the Thrive Charter School Society.

The seed funding for the school started with the Edmonton's Priestner family, proprietors of the Go Auto dealership empire, who purchased the school property close to Archbishop MacDonald High School two years ago and helped set up the charter school society.

"Jared Priestner (Go Auto CEO) was inspired by seeing a lot of the charter schools in the United States that address the economic and other opportunity gaps that children have in other cities and, inspired by that, came and bought this school, then said, 'OK, we need to stand a school up for kids who are challenged by opportunity gaps in both education and social well being," Hladun told CTV News Edmonton.

The focus on STEM programming is a first in Alberta for an elementary charter school, said Hladun, adding that class sizes will be kept low to help provide "a very high quality of education."

Alberta Education funds the education portion of the school, which will host 164 students from northwest Edmonton, while the Thrive Charter School Society provides donation funds to cover costs for meals, bussing and extracurricular activities. The school is also partnering with the Jasper Place Child and Family Resource Society to provide family services to help make it "a good and safe place for parents to come to school and access any of the services and supports that they need for their family and also in service for their children's education," said Hladun.

Donna Rankin-Anderson, Thrive's principal, said she and her staff are looking forward to welcoming students and their families and to building strong relationships with them.

"I look forward to being able to build that rapport with our students and their parents," Rankin-Anderson said. "Being a small school, we will have a lot of opportunity to build that relationship to know those kids by name, know their pet names, know all those things that we probably couldn't do in a larger school."

Find out more about Thrive Elementary Charter School at its website.

With files from CTV News Edmonton's Evan Kenny