The Queen Elizabeth Elementary School expansion won’t be open until sometime in the 2025-26 school year — more than a year later than originally anticipated.
A report presented to the New Westminster school board earlier this evening (Tuesday, April 11) notes the project has been moving slowly.
“The planning stages have taken more time than initially contemplated, which is why we anticipate a delay of opening into the 2025-26 school year at this point,” reads the report from School District 40 secretary-treasurer Bettina Ketcham.
The expansion project was first announced in 2021, when the province announced $20.1 million in funding for a 325-student expansion including 13 new classrooms and child-care space. At the time, construction was expected to begin in the summer of 2022, with the expansion completed in early 2024.
When the design for the new school was unveiled to parents in the summer of 2022, the district’s director of capital projects had hoped for a September 2023 opening “in a perfect world,” as Dave Crowe put it at the time.
But the “very complex” site has posed some challenges.
Ketcham noted the issues are twofold: first, it's a "constrained and small" site; and second, it's on a bog and below a floodplain.
"Those two pieces in tandem create a very challenging site from a construction perspective," she said.
"We want to make sure that we optimize the design of the building and try to achieve the best value that we can, being mindful of the requirements that the province and the city have from a safety perspective."
Plus, she noted, the district wants to make sure it takes the time to design "21st-century learning spaces."
The two-storey addition includes 13 classrooms, a multipurpose room and space for before-and-after-school child care. The floor plan unveiled in June 2022 reflects similar design elements seen in the district’s newest schools, Skwo:wech Elementary and New Westminster Secondary, with glass-walled classrooms grouped around collaborative learning spaces, rather than a traditional corridor layout.
The expansion is planned to be connected to the existing school with an enclosed, five-metre-long breezeway.
To make that all happen, given the complexities of the site, means the school expansion won't be ready to open until sometime in the 2025/26 school year, Ketcham said.
She acknowledged that time frame is somewhat "vague" but said the district hopes to narrow that range after it gets a couple more planning milestones under its belt, including transportation studies and a review by the City of New Westminster's design panel.
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