New Westminster’s much-needed new Fraser River elementary school is already delayed, and it’s not even out of the gate.
School District 40 is working on plans for a new 600-student elementary school on the site occupied by Fraser River Middle School, overlooking Simcoe Park.
The new school, with a hoped-for completion by 2027, is planned to help the district cope with overcrowding at schools in the fast-growing city core — where both École Qayqayt and Lord Kelvin elementary schools are so full that they may need lotteries for kindergarten enrolment this coming fall.
SD40 has submitted a concept plan for approval to the B.C. Ministry of Education and had originally hoped to have word back by March.
But Dave Crowe, the district’s director of capital projects, says that’s now not going to happen.
“It’s looking now like it’s going to be pushed out to possibly June, which will slow us down considerably on that project,” Crowe reported at the school board’s Feb. 7 operations committee meeting.
Crowe said the ministry has reported that it’s currently “overwhelmed” with projects that it’s trying to get in front of the Treasury Board for approval.
Trustee Danielle Connelly asked what the delay could mean for the projected opening date of the new school.
“Obviously, the more we get pushed out, the longer everything else gets pushed,” Crowe said. “Obviously, we do everything in our power to try to make up the time, but you can only do so much.”
Crowe said the district is being “very proactive” and getting as much work done as possible to move towards the next stage of the approval process, known as the project definition report.
“We’re working on that so that as soon as we do get approval, we’ll be able to quickly submit our project definition report and hopefully expedite some of those approvals, but they are definitely taking longer than we had hoped.
“But we’re trying to be optimistic and working with them to see if there’s anything we can do to expedite that.”
SD40 scrambling for space in downtown schools
If the new school goes ahead as planned, it will be built on district-owned land next to Fraser River Middle School on the Queens Avenue side, using Simcoe Park to provide greenspace for both schools.
The planned three-storey school would house students from kindergarten to Grade 5.
The Ministry of Education gave the district the green light to work on a concept plan for the new school in March of 2022 — but it has yet to approve the necessary money to build it.
In the meantime, SD40 has been looking for ways to fit students into its downtown-area schools, including converting community space at Qayqayt and Fraser River Middle School into classrooms.
That conversion has pushed out two community organizations that previously occupied space in the schools: New West Family Place, which was operating out of Qayqayt; and the Purpose Society, which runs daycare centres in both schools. A total of 72 daycare spaces are being displaced to two other schools significantly away from the downtown core, F.W. Howay in Massey-Victory Heights and Lord Tweedsmuir in the West End — a move that has drawn criticism from parents who say it will make child care inaccessible to many families who live in the downtown area.
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