By Sheldon Spackman

Construction contract awarded for Evergreen School replacement

Jan 18, 2019 | 5:26 PM

Construction is expected to start on a new Evergreen Elementary replacement school in Drayton Valley in the coming weeks.

That according to Wild Rose School Division superintendent Brad Volkman who says Alberta Infrastructure has awarded the project contract to Chandos Construction.

“We’re really excited about it,” says Volkman. “Things are on schedule and it shows that we’re progressing towards our goal of having a new replacement school. We’re excited to work with Chandos as they convert our design into a magnificent new school.”

Volkman says the need for a replacement Evergreen school became apparent in November of 2016 when a water issue was noted in the school’s crawl space.

“It was something that we had been monitoring for years,” states Volkman. “We knew it was there and we were doing all the proper things in getting things tested and air quality testing and all the rest just to make sure our students were safe. The air quality was fine, that wasn’t the issue, it ended up being certain floor boards that just started to be rotting from the water and the mold.”

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As a result, Volkman says they had to shut down four classrooms at Evergreen School, which has now been torn down.

“So we put all the kids into the remaining classrooms, which meant the library had 60 kids in it as a classroom for the remainder of the year,” he recalls. “Then for the 2017-2018 schoolyear, we fully closed Evergreen School and redistributed the kids into all the other schools within the jurisdiction. That continues but in the meantime, we’ve been awarded another school to replace the Evergreen School.”

Volkman says the new replacement Evergreen School will open to a capacity of 250 students but be built to eventually accommodate roughly 400.

“That’s based on our utilization rates,” he explains. “Right now we’ve jam-packed all of our schools in Drayton Valley full and when that opens up with 250 new seats, we’ll move kids into that new school. But Eldorado School, it has some really old portables on there and those will then be torn down.”

Volkman adds it’s still to be determined what grades will populate the school.

“Right now we have two elementary schools in Drayton Valley, this will put us back to three,” he exclaims. “Prior to all of this, those three schools were all K-6 schools, so there’s lots of people in the community that would like to see us go back to making all of them at least K-5. But the Board has to make that decision, so probably we’re looking at next fall because then the school should be ready to open at the latest by January of 2021.”

Volkman points out the replacement Evergreen School will be on the same property as the old one but this time on higher ground to avoid repeating the former site’s issues.

“Also, they won’t build a crawl space, it’ll be construction on concrete slab and essentially be built differently than it was years ago,” says Volkman. “All of our schools, they’re older and the way they were built, you don’t have big, open gathering areas or open spaces or natural light coming in, so there’s going to be a lot more of that. You’ll also have classrooms with a regular door into the class but have a large sliding glass door that will open up into the learning commons, so basically classrooms surrounding a learning commons area, kind of the new word for library.”    

In terms of price tag, Volkman admits they don’t know as Alberta Infrastructure is the project manager.

“When it comes to the dollars, we’re not that involved,” says Volkman. “We’re involved in the design but we don’t manage the project at all. It wasn’t even up to Wild Rose to choose the general contractor, that was done by Alberta Infrastructure.”