The local Catholic school board is excited to welcome students back.
The 2026-27 school year will officially kick off on Tuesday morning and the Windsor-Essex Catholic District School Board says there’s a lot to look forward to.
John Ulicny, Chief Executive Officer with the board, says enrolment is up for the year as well, with 8,844 secondary students - an increase of nearly 300 pupils. Elementary student enrolment is also up nearly 200 students compared to last year with 15,250 children.
A number of schools have been undergoing improvements, including the new addition at St. Joseph’s High School which is complete ahead of schedule by five months.
Ulicny says there’s a lot of excitement around the school year.
“We are ready for their arrival here at school. There’s been a lot of work done in our facilities throughout the course of the summer to deal with the anticipated growth that we need throughout the system, and we’re excited to welcome them back to another year of Catholic faith-filled learning.”
He says there has been a lot of construction done over the summer.
“We’ve done some work at F.J. Brennan and Corpus Christi Middle School, we’ve also done some work at St. Rose, and at our adult campus where we have our adult learners at the former Catholic Central where is St. Michael’s Adult is currently housed. Those improvements will help deal with some of the challenges that we’ve faced in the past, and we’re always looking at ways that we can improve our facilities.”
Ulicny says enrolment numbers are up.
“We’re significantly up in our secondary panel, we anticipated that back in the spring given the fact that we were graduating a very big Grade 8 cohort. In our elementary panel, we are also up as well. So when we look at it in totality comparing both panels, we’ll be up as a system from where we were at this time last year.”
The board saw approximately 15,000 elementary and 8,500 secondary students in 2025-26.
This will be Ulicny’s first year as Chief Executive Officer with the board following the retirement of Emelda Byrne.
