Fact Sheet

Mission

As a French Immersion school, École Varennes provides a safe and respectful learning environment which facilitates the acquisition of useful knowledge, skills and attitudes essential for responsible citizenship.

Motto

To honour, to inspire, to discover.

History

Long before St. Vital became a village, the area surrounding the school was known as Varennes. Pierre Gaultier de Varennes, also known as La Vérandrye, was the first European to visit the forks of the Red and Assiniboine rivers in 1738. The famous explorer came from the north-eastern village of Varennes, France—the village in which Louis XIV and Marie-Antoinette sought refuge before their beheading in 1791, and a village that was at the centre of the Battle of Argonne during the First World War.

When École Varennes first opened its doors as Varennes School in 1951, it had 235 students in six classrooms with no library, gymnasium, music room, and certainly no computer room.

Nineteen sixty-one marked the peak of its enrolment with 711 students. In 1978, the first French Immersion classes were added, and in 1984 the school became a French-Immersion-only facility.

The beautiful mural on the school's west side was painted by Jill Sellers in 2000 with the help of every student in the school.

Grades

K–8

Number of Students

275

^{Data collected September 30, 2008.}

Number of Staff

31

^{Data collected September 30, 2008.}

Administrators

Contact Information