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The main entrance of Citadel High. Photo: Carrie Gilbert

School leaders at Halifax’s newest high school, Citadel High, say problems have been few with the merger of Queen Elizabeth High and St. Pats. 

Since opening on Sept. 6, 2007, Citadel High has been a success. The new high school includes such features as two large music rooms with state of the art recording technology, two computer labs, a library, and an LCD projector and four computers in each classroom.

“Citadel High is a centre of excellence for arts, for technology,” says the student council co-president Ben Proudfoot. “There’s no resource we haven’t thought of.”

Citadel High brought in approximately 1,400 all together students: around 900 from Queen Elizabeth High School and around 300 from St. Patrick’s High School, a couple hundred from private schools, and new students.

“There hasn’t been much rivalry between the two groups from the populations of those two schools,” says Proudfoot. As co-president of the student council, he’s been really pleased to start new traditions.

Vice-principal Wade Smith says students from all walks of life enrol at Citadel High, and all for different reasons.

Since it’s only the first year, he can’t predict results, but has confidence in what the school can achieve. “I know that, once we get up and rolling, I’m sure that our potential will be limitless.”

Open to change

The back of Citadel High, near the building's Communty Centre Photo: Carrie Gilbert

Proudfoot thinks that bringing together students from different schools to Citadel High has worked because everyone has been open to change. 

“I think things have gone a lot better than planned, largely due to the efforts from the student’s council and students themselves—they’re very open to new ideas and very open to new people.”

Vice-principal Smith says Citadel High has been as successful as any new school could expect to be.

“We brought together two former high schools, two cultures, two staff, two communities—more than two communities. We brought a number of different people together.” Smith admits that there have been growing pains. Among these growing pains is the school’s issue with hoodies. In September, Citadel High banned it’s students from wearing hoodies. This was soon changed to a hoods-off rule.

The school has also had issue with their air quality, which was tested by the school board in November when a number of people complained about rashes, itchiness, sore throats and headaches. Air purifiers were brought into classrooms to help the situation.

Smith says that since everyone at the school is so busy and as soon as one thing is finished, they’re on to the next, it’s hard for him to remember September. But he believes the school has done well so far in making things work.

“We’ve got the Capital Campaign going towards money so that we can have our auditorium finished soon,” he says, “We’ve dedicated one of the community gyms to Bobby Douglas, a former coach and teacher at Queen Elizabeth.”

“A lot of planning actually went into this first year,” says Proudfoot. “A lot of people were consulted. Students and staff got together on a regular basis.”

Citadel High thrives

Proudfoot says that because the school is new, it hasn’t quite defined itself yet. 

“It certainly is developing itself a personality and has been within the past couple of months, but that’s going to be our job to work on that,” he says. “School spirit can be defined by how loud you cheer at a game, or really how much pride each and every student takes in their school and their reasons for having that pride. We’re trying to give opportunities for students to take leadership and to take pride in their school. ”

Proudfoot says the student council has created a new constitution outlining their purposes and goals. “That represents making dances available for people,” he says, “or maybe calling people in city council to make a cross walk happen, which are things that we’ve done before.”

“Even though it seems, to the outside, that we’ve done a lot this year, I think that we still only scratched the surface,” Smith explains. “We still have a lot of other things we can do to bring the community into the building and continue to engage students.

One of the things the Citadel High school has engaged in is Imagine Our Schools,which helps the community form a vision for its schools. The program is newer than the school itself.

“Not a lot of students knew what Imagine Our Schools was, especially in junior high school,” explains Proudfoot. He says student council plans to survey some high school and junior high school students so that they can have an input into issues facing their school. “I had a discussion with Maureen O’Shaughnessy who’s the head of consultation and the deadline when were going to present it to the school board is March 5,” he says.

Though things have gone well for Citadel High so far, Smith says this is only the beginning.

“We’re just not there yet, simply because we spent most of this year trying to figure out how you do things for the first time. It’s a brand new school, we’ve tried things that worked, we’ve tried things that haven’t worked, we’re going to have to revisit those things in the future.”

For now, Smith is confident in the prospects Citadel High has seen and expects them to continue.

“I’m pleased and hopeful that in the next ten years, this school will still be thriving and be as popular as it is now.”