More of Manitoba’s Grade 9 students will learn under the same roof as their older peers in the coming years.
Starting next month, all high schools in southwest Winnipeg — including Pembina Trails Collegiate, Fort Richmond Collegiate and Vincent Massey Collegiate — will offer Grade 9-12 programming.
“It makes a lot of sense to have kids in high school when they’re collecting credits,” said Troy Scott, assistant superintendent of personnel and education services in the Pembina Trails School Division.
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The Lord Selkirk School Division is the latest to announce a restructuring of grades to reflect “true” elementary, junior high and secondary schools, moving Grade 9s to 9-12 settings.
Shuffling ninth graders will give them more elective course options, access to specialty facilities and extracurriculars, and ensure they and their teachers can do four-year planning, Scott said.
The final phase of “Making the Move,” a widespread restructuring of the division, will group more students with their peers associated with early years, middle years and senior years philosophies.
Grades in 13 buildings have been updated ahead of back-to-school season and impact about 1,400 students.
The Lord Selkirk School Division is making similar changes in 2025-26.
Among them, Lockport School will become a textbook junior high school — Grade 6-8 instead of 7-9.
“I love (the changes). I absolutely love them. I’m so excited for it — for the kids, for the staff,” said principal Harold Freiter, who is entering his fifth year at the helm of the middle school.
Freiter’s education bible is The Successful Middle School: This We Believe. The guide, released by the U.S.-based Association for Middle Level Education, promotes team-building in lesson planning and teaching students who are beginning to gain independence while navigating puberty.
The LSSD restructuring will support a pivot from a longstanding departmental model where middle schoolers have various core subject teachers to a “teaming structure,” he said.
The school has already started assigning students to a duo of core subject teachers to support their transition between the single classroom teacher model in early years and a variety of subject area experts at the high school level.
Grade 6-8 students will have plenty of one-on-one time with a team of teachers who get to know them well, Freiter said, adding that it’s especially important to give students at these ages a sense of belonging and “connectedness.”
The principal noted the adjustments will ensure all older students can study closer to home since Grade 9 pupils occasionally leave Lockport School early to attend a high school with a wider range of courses and programs.
“If we’re going to maximize opportunities for kids, they need to be in the environments that they’re best suited to learn in,” said Jerret Long, superintendent of the district encompassing Selkirk, St. Andrews, and Grand Marais.
Grade 6 and 9 are pivotal transitional years, Long said, adding he often hears from teachers that their sixth graders are “ready for middle school.”
The majority of Winnipeg high schools are now Grade 9-12 models.
The River East Transcona School Division has only operated that way since September 2016. The majority of Grade 6-8 students in the area attend standalone middle schools.
For superintendent Sandra Herbst, there’s much more to a middle school than its title.
Herbst said the culture in these buildings centres “student voice and choice” and they are typically outfitted with industrial arts labs, nutrition classrooms and woodworking spaces to encourage exploration.
Scott said the incoming changes in his division will have pedagogical and developmental benefits for Pembina Trails students while allowing the division to meet challenges associated with growing enrolment.
Acadia Junior High will shuffle from offering Grades 7-9 to 6-8.
General Byng, previously a K-9 site, and both Arthur A. Leach and Henry G. Izatt — formerly 5-9 buildings — have dropped Grade 9.
An additional six elementary schools — Bairdmore, Chancellor, Dalhousie, Oakenwald, Prairie Sunrise and Ralph Maybank — have shed Grade 6 and are now K-5 buildings.
maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca
Maggie Macintosh
Education reporter
Maggie Macintosh reports on education for the Free Press. Originally from Hamilton, Ont., Maggie was an intern at the Free Press twice while earning her degree at Ryerson’s School of Journalism (now Toronto Metropolitan University) before joining the newsroom as a reporter in 2019. Read more about Maggie.
Funding for the Free Press education reporter comes from the Government of Canada through the Local Journalism Initiative.
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