The earliest date that the new high school in Athabasca will open is September 2017.
That is even in light of the provincial government’s latest update on construction timelines made last Tuesday, according to Mark Francis, the superintendent of Aspen View Public Schools.
“Are we going to get a shovel in the ground this building season? I’m not a builder, but you don’t plan a $40 million school in a couple months,” he said.
“Now I’m not the Ministry of Education. I’m not Alberta Infrastructure. Realistically, the earliest we’d see the new school is September 2017.”
In the province’s press conference, it was explained that all of the school projects that were previously announced are going ahead with sped up construction timelines.
“Alberta faces major fiscal challenges, but our commitment to core services has not changed,” Infrastructure Minister Manmeet Bhullar said during the conference.
“By extracting better value for the dollars we spend, we are protecting priority infrastructure projects and building the schools Albertans need.”
According to Francis, that doesn’t affect the Athabasca project.
“Right now, there’s a number of different building projects in different phases with the government. We were in the first phase of announcements and, at this point, we’re still proceeding on schedule,” said Francis.
“Any announcements from the government, we’ve been told that our projects are proceedings at the phase we’re in.”
The most recent step in the design process was that various project stakeholders held a “visioning” meeting with the bridging architect firm recently.
“What a visioning exercise does is the architect puts us through, asks us some questions about what’s working now; what’s not working now; what do you want to see in the future,” explained Francis.
The firm showed the group trends and asked them questions on the environmental footprint and what they’d like to see in the building; a process that Francis thought went rather well.
“Very positive meeting. It was really exciting,” he said.
“I’ve had the opportunity to see what some of the new buildings in the province are looking like and they’re pretty spectacular, so having everyone see them in a slide presentation, what schools could look like in this day and age, was pretty good and we got a lot of great feedback.”
The next step is a 40 to 50-day wait for the rough designs to come back from the bridging architect. Following that, the stakeholders will decide what they’d like to change in the design – this will include some community consultation.
“At that point, we would firm up some of the details. We would actually say ‘Yes we like that, no we don’t,’” Francis stated.
“At which point, they would start actually going to the design phase, the true doing up plans and then costing that.”
They would then put the project out to tender.
Francis stated he’s really excited that the new school project is finally officially underway.
“We’ve been waiting. There’s been a lot of bureaucracy because of elections and budgets and we’ve been waiting for approvals between town, county and school board, so it’s just exciting to actually have the movement forward now,” he added.
