Construction of the replacement New Westminster Secondary School is an ongoing roller-coaster – but it’s almost done.
That’s the word from the school district’s director of capital projects, Dave Crowe, who gave an update to trustees at the school board’s Oct. 13 operations committee meeting (held virtually via Webex).
Crowe told trustees the project has been a “roller-coaster” – almost daily, he said, the project team will get some good news about one aspect of the project followed by a challenge in another.
The exterior cladding, one of the last steps in the project, is due to be done in the next couple of weeks. Right now, Crowe said, crews are working on commissioning IT, HVAC and other systems.
He noted the first delivery of furniture arrived Oct. 6, and now the project is seeing a semi-truck load of furniture arriving every other day or so.
“It is starting to look very much like a school,” he said.
The school had originally been scheduled for move-in this fall, but that plan was derailed when the COVID-19 pandemic created supply-chain and workforce challenges.
“We are starting to get out of the woods in terms of the COVID influences,” Crowe told trustees.
At the previous operations committee meeting in September, trustees heard that a mid-year move-in this year would likely be feasible, but Crowe wasn’t yet able to provide a firm move-in date as of the night of the meeting.
He assured trustees that fixing a move-in date is “job 1” right now.
“We are working to get into that school as soon as we possibly can,” he said.
