Last week, NOTL council and Friends of NDSS proposed their own options for schooling that they will present to the District School Board of Niagara in the future. The attempts were made in an effort to preserve NDSS and prevent the school from closure.

Council's recommendation included building new facilities that would hold a "new rejuvenated" high school and elementary school to house Virgil and Colonel John Butler students on the NDSS site.

The Friends of NDSS, a group that supports the viability of the town's only high school, suggests having the merged Virgil and Colonel John Butler elementary sites merged in one building featured in a complex with a new high school and new community centre on the NDSS site.

The aim of both proposals is to give trustees another option to closing NDSS. The campus will include shared facilities such as gymnasium, library and computer laboratories. Incorporating the new community centre was also part of the proposal.

Julie Hunter and Dorothy Wiens, co-chairs of Colonel John Butler's parent advisory council, said parents accept the fact that Butler will be closing and very happy to merge with Virgil. However, the biggest concern is that there's not enough space on the Virgil site to build a new school.

In a survey asking parents where they would like to see a new school built, Hunter said a majority of parents would like to see a new school either on the Butler or NDSS site.

"Even if it's built on NDSS site, I think parents would like to have a visual to see what it would look like with both schools on one site," Hunter said. "We want to see what the separate facilities would look like."

Bonnie Heuving, co-chair of the Virgil parent advisory council, said out of 192 families that send their children to Virgil, only six families have said they wanted a new school on the NDSS site.

"They still want the school where it is," Heuving said. "It's important to keep things local. A lot of kids walk to school, some families don't have cars to drive kids to school. I couldn't imagine being far away from the school."