Rockridge Secondary School

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Rockridge Secondary School is a five-year secondary school located in West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. It is one of the three principal public high schools in West Vancouver. The school has a grass field and one baseball diamond. The main field is used for all sports, such as soccer, Canadian football and rugby.

History

As early as 1993 the District of West Vancouver received considerable demand that a new community centre was needed in the western part of the district, due in part to the district's rising population throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, as well as the geographic positioning of many of its residents – the main community centre was a 15-30 minute drive for some. After a piece of vacant land in the Caulfeild neighborhood was purchased, plans began for a multi-use facility, which would house a swimming pool, gym, and new middle school. After several rounds of public input and concerns over expenditure, the project was scaled back to build just a middle school that would replace the aging Hillside school 5 km away in upper Ambleside. As 2012, the school receives hundreds of international students every year to make school exchange, mainly students from China, Japan and South American countries such as Brazil and Colombia.

Design and construction

The design and construction of the school was at the time considered to be very advanced. With a concrete

Opening

Rockridge opened in September 1996, as a middle school serving grades 7–9. After the restructuring of the School District 45 in the 1998–1999 school year, elementary students stayed at their schools that were expanded to include grade 7. Rockridge then became a school for students in grades 8-10. The most recent change to the school population came in the 2001–2002 school year, when SD45 decided to expand Rockridge to a full senior secondary school starting the following year (it had been previously known as a junior secondary and before that a middle school). Students who were in grade 10 at that time were given the option to complete grades 11 and 12 at West Vancouver Secondary School or stay at Rockridge as the school expanded by one grade each year until graduation in 2004. Because of the capacity of the school (which was not originally designed to hold five grades), the graduating class of 2004 was about 125 students, as opposed to the larger classes of WVSS which could number in the hundreds.

Media attention

West Vancouver is considered to be one of the most affluent areas in Canada.