Parents in Montreal start petition to add windows to ‘bunker-like’ school

MONTREAL — Five days a week, students at a high school in one of Montreal’s poorest districts spend all day learning math and science in classrooms without windows.

In the winter, when the sun rises late and sets early, they may go days without hardly seeing any natural light at all, says a parent who started a petition to force the school board and province to add windows to the school nicknamed “the bunker.”

Jacques Langlois, a father of four and head of the governing board at the high school Louis-Joseph-Papineau, said the petition rose out of frustration that nothing has been done to improve conditions at the 50-year-old concrete building, where the only windows are small slits lighting the stairwell, he said.

“I don’t think it’s fair, I don’t think it’s acceptable that it’s been that way for so long,” he said. “To me, it’s inexplicable.”

Langlois says the school serves many lower-income families and newcomers, many of whom live in sub-par housing as they adapt to Canada.

“At home it’s not ideal, at school it’s not ideal,” he said.

The change.org petition, which had more than 5,700 signatures as of Sunday morning, links to a website run by the parents that lists articles detailing the beneficial effects of natural light on concentration and mood.

The school, built in 1970, is a vast expanse of stacked white concrete blocks and was built to accommodate 2,700 students. The school website says a little more than 1,300 students are enrolled in Grades 7 to 11.

“The presence of many blind walls in reinforced concrete highlights the fact that the building is designed to be closed on itself,” reads a pamphlet produced by the school board that details the architecture of its schools.

According to the pamphlet, the lack of natural light was a deliberate attempt by the architects to minimize distraction — a “prevailing ideology at the time” that has since fallen from favour, the authors said.

“Architects justify this by the importance of promoting concentration of the mind by controlling any source of external distraction,” it reads.

The school board, the Commission scolaire de Montreal, announced in a news release on Jan. 30 that it would begin feasibility studies on major renovations, which includes adding windows.

“The issue of windows for our students is primordial for the CDSM,” the board said in a statement.

But Langlois worries the file could drag on for years or worse, be forgotten altogether now that the current provincial government has passed a bill that abolishes school boards.

He also wonders why the school has taken so long to act.

“We’re in 2020, it’s not normal,” he said. “We’re talking about many, many years that people have known about the issue.”

He wants change to come quickly to the school he calls “Louis-Jo.” He hopes that within a year or two, the school can at the very least add an atrium or other well-lit common areas, so kids can get their “daily dose of sunlight.”

If not, he wants to see the school torn down and rebuilt.

Claudine Deom, a professor of architecture at the Universite de Montreal, says the building is an example of the brutalist style that was prevalent in the 1960s and ’70s. 

A focus on artificial lighting and a blocky, sometimes stark look that showed off raw material, especially concrete, clashes with our definition of what architecture should be today but was in fashion at the time, she said.

“What we consider today as poor architecture might have been considered 50 years ago as what you should be doing,” said Deom, who has worked with the school board.

“That’s a natural evolution. Now we’re facing today in 2020 buildings that were built with a completely different mindset,” she said.

In Deom’s opinion, piercing the facade to add windows to the building should be “doable,” noting that another school, HEC Montreal, did a similar renovation on another concrete building.

In her opinion, it would also be the right thing to do.

“Even though it’s identified as representative of the architecture of that period, it doesn’t mean it can’t be changed,” she said of the building.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 9, 2020

Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press