By Sheldon Spackman

BUILDING SCHOOLS

Clearwater County supporting Wild Rose capital projects

Apr 12, 2019 | 2:30 PM

Clearwater County is throwing its support behind a pair of school capital projects in the Wild Rose School Division.

On Tuesday, Clearwater County council approved matching community funds raised to enhance the District’s proposed Condor School Capital Project, following an approval in February of matching community funds raised for the District’s Leslieville School Capital Project as well.

Brad Volkman, Superintendent of Schools for Wild Rose School Division, says with Clearwater County deciding to match any funds raised by Friends of the Corridor Schools, it means the group’s efforts are now being doubled.

“If our project is approved and Alberta Education chooses to fund it, they kind of have standards as to how much they’ll spend, given the size of the school that will be built or modernized,” he explains. “It’s an opportunity to reach out to the community and find out would you like to enhance these? Because sometimes you know, they’d like a bigger gym or they’d like a bigger library or bigger kitchen, so the community is talking about those things and so they’ve got their own fundraising group, Friends of the Corridor Schools.”

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Volkman says the Corridor Capital Project involves three schools within the District.

“It involves the closing of David Thompson High School and that’s because of a lagoon issue,” says Volkman. “We got a letter from Alberta Municipal Affairs telling us that we have to close it by December 31, 2021 and that’s our high school. So in order to support our high school students in that area, we need to put them in one of our other two schools in the corridor.”

As a result, Volkman says Leslieville School has been chosen as the future home of high school students in the corridor.

“But Leslieville school is built as an elementary school, so it needs to actually be changed into a high school with proper shops and a big enough gymnasium and so on,” he explains. “It’s been determined that it would be more affordable to build new and start from scratch compared to trying to modernize that one into a high school. Then we would modernize Condor School, so our new plan would see all the kids from K-6 going to Condor and all the kids from grade 7-12 going to Leslieville.”

Volkman adds however, until the provincial election is over, those projects will remain in a holding pattern for now.

“Depending on which party ends up winning the election, one of their tasks will be to look at all those submitted projects and decide how many they can afford to fund,” he declares. “Of course there’s pressures all over the province like growth in Edmonton and Calgary. In cases like ours, we have a school that actually can no longer be used after December 31, 2021, so we have a different sort of a need.”

If provincial funding is approved for the Corridor Capital Project this spring, Volkman says no time would be wasted on getting the project going.

“We would move very quickly into the design phase and start designing both the modernization of Condor and the building of a new high school,” adds Volkman. “From there you move to construction and it takes two and a half years to go through that whole process.”

How much can be raised for the capital projects through community fundraising and government support however, is still an unknown according to Volkman.

“We have no idea how much that Friends of the Corridor group will raise,” admits Volkman. “We have talked to other communities in the province who have done this and in some cases those fundraising groups raise close to a million dollars, so whether or not that would happen in this case, I don’t know.”