North Battleford Comprehensive High School has been undergoing a major renovation to include a second gymnasium and classroom space to accommodate Grade 7 students next school year, but additional work ordered to generate even more classroom space has hit a snag.
While the major renovation is sufficient to accommodate the Grade 7s who will be moving there this fall, it was decided three additional spaces would be renovated to allow for any fluctuation in enrolment and for the delivery of student support services.
One of three spaces scheduled to be renovated was the lecture theatre, where a folding moveable wall was to be installed to create two new classrooms, each about 600 square feet.
According to Lonny Darroch, Living Sky School Division's chief financial officer, getting the right trusses to support the moveable wall could put the project back at least five months. The board of education wanted the work to be done by the beginning of the school year.
Reporting to the board at a recent regular meeting, Darroch said after finding the trusses needed would have an order time of five months the division asked the architect and structural engineer to come up with options.
One would be a permanent wall, he said, but that would mean the lecture theatre would cease to exist.
So an idea that had been decided against earlier this school year will be revisited. Creating classroom space on the mezzanine of the gym had been considered but came at a high price tag, said Darroch. It appears now, that may have been overestimated, so some revised pricing has been requested.
The other two components of the additional work are still on track. The first is refurbishing classroom 149, which has been used as an SRC room. It is being retrofitted with new ceiling tiles, new lights, new paint and new white boards in order to be returned to classroom status.
A second space, a band room referred to as the Rock, is to be repurposed as a multipurpose area, which would accommodate the displaced SRC as well as other uses such as counselling or meeting space.
Despite all the current construction, North Battleford Comprehensive High School isn’t getting any bigger. However, the provincial funding Living Sky is to receive for the operation and maintenance of their schools has gone down, based on a number that shows up to 50,000 square feet of space are no longer being recognized, most of it NBCHS.
Darroch is following up with the Ministry of Education on this "puzzling" discrepancy.
