Work to prepare the site of Weyburn’s new elementary school has begun, and pilings will begin to be installed in early March, trustees for the Southeast Cornerstone School Division were told at their monthly board meeting on Wednesday.
The update on the new school project was provided by Andy Dobson, manager of facilities and transportation for Cornerstone, as part of an overall update on his department, along with Jim Swyryda, facilities operations supervisor.
With construction set to start soon, Dobson noted they are seven months behind their original plan, but once construction starts, the contractor, Wright Construction of Saskatoon, will have two years to complete construction of the new school, along with the Weyburn Recreation and Culture Centre for the City of Weyburn on the former site of the Weyburn Junior High, which has been demolished and removed.
The school should be completed by about March of 2021, to be followed by three months of commissioning, and over the summer the playground equipment will be moved over from the elementary schools the new school is replacing (Haig, Queen Elizabeth and Souris), for opening in September of 2021. The new school will have capacity for 650 to 750 students and a new 51-space day care.
“It has been in design for a year and a half, and I hope our due diligence will pay dividends at the end,” said Dobson.
He added that Wright Construction will be putting up perimeter fences in the next week or so with the pilings to start in the first week of March. The City of Weyburn has removed the outdoor rink, as the new WRCC will be going onto that site, and a new outdoor rink will be constructed behind the WRCC, with the same ice surface size as the ice in Crescent Point Place.
Dobson noted the process for building this school is much more complex than the one involved with the major renovations and construction at the Weyburn Comprehensive School. This included setting up a joint-use agreement, with the City of Weyburn taking ownership of the WRCC portion of the facililty instead of the school division, and involved the use of lawyers to make sure it was satisfactory to both Cornerstone and the City.
Among the other activities the facilities and transportation department is busy with, they are working on a five-year compliance plan for school fire codes, with the completion date of the plan extended to 2021.
Part of complying with the new fire codes is removing all microwave ovens out of classrooms, and reducing the amount of coverings classroom walls can have. Walls in classrooms can have 20 per cent of their walls covered (such as with posters and displays) and about 10 per cent for the walls in the hallways.
The facilities for facilities and transportation shops also have a safety compliance plan which was completed in 2018, including new eye wash stations, explosion-proof cabinets and safety guards.
Cornerstone has a 10-year playground remediation plan, where they are upgrading the safety of playground equipment at the 37 schools in the southeast, and the completion date will be 2026, to help give local groups time to fundraise for new equipment if they need it.
“We don’t remove anything from a playground without approval from the principal and the school community council. We’ve removed a lot of outdated playground equipment,” said Dobson, noting they are trying to give local groups time for fundraising for new playground equipment, as “you don’t get much for $100,000.”
Evaluating and working on roofs of school buildings is a major piece of the maintenance of facilities, and Cornerstone has engaged the services of RMIS to thoroughly check out the roofs.
The level of complaints about roofs failing or leaking has been reduced drastically in the last number of years, said Dobson, noting that where 35.5 per cent of roofs had problems in 2011, that was down to 14.4 per cent as of April of 2018.
Aging infrastructure is also a huge part of maintaining school facilities, as one of the issues they are dealing with are HVAC air handling systems in schools nearing the end of their lifespans.
The bus fleet is also aging, noted Dobson, which was why Cornerstone spent $1 million last year to acquire nine new buses.
“We’ll need that much again in the next couple of years. The repairs (to the bus fleet) are really hurting the budget,” he said.
In addition to that, Weyburn’s transportation shop is in extremely poor condition and limits the capacity of repairs that can be done there. Dobson said they are looking at building a new 12,000-sq.-ft. shop that will be part of this year’s budget request.
Cornerstone has filed two major projects for their next major capital project, including a new PreK-12 school for Carlyle, and a major upgrade for the Estevan Comprehensive School. They are also requesting relocatable classrooms for MacLeod Elementary and for Arcola School.
Finally, Swyryda explained how a priority management system has been working for dealing with maintenance issues at Cornerstone’s 37 schools, with a central program used for filing of work order requests throughout the school year. He noted there have been 1,136 service requests made of their department since September in the current school year, and 25,316 requests have been made since 2008.
