The New Westminster School District has had to learn what it's like to operate an old cemetery.
The school district wants to install a plumbing system in portables on the New Westminster Secondary School site, but before shovels can hit the ground, the district had to inform groups whose ancestors or former members may have been buried on the site.
The area it wants to dig is located behind the school library, which is not part of the designated cemetery site at the high school. Still, the entire site is protected under a heritage conservation agreement, therefore it must inform the groups.
"So, if we want to do work - ground-altering activity - we have to go through process, and this is part of the process," board of education chair James Janzen told The Record.
Earlier this month, the district applied for a site alteration permit pursuant to section 12 of the Heritage Conservation Act. The application was sent to more than 30 groups that may have had members buried on the site, which housed an active burial ground from the 1860s to 1917. Those groups include churches, First Nations bands, Chinese-Canadians, Masons, Khalsa Diwan Society and the B.C. Association of Community Living.
The purpose was to "inform" the groups, Janzen said.
"Basically, if you look at all of the churches and the Masons and all of those kinds of people, it's any group that might have had somebody buried on the site, and of course the Tsilhqot'in is interested and Métis Association and the B.C. association for the disabled is interested because, before they had a cemetery at Woodlands, that cemetery was used to bury people from Woodlands and from what was then Essendale, now Riverview," he said. "We're trying not to miss anybody. We may have cast the net a little bit wide, but better to err on the side of including everybody and then not missing anybody."
If any of the groups or individuals has any objections, the district will attempt to deal with them, Janzen said.
"It's all regulated by the heritage conservation branch," he said. "People can't just say, 'No, I don't want you to do that because we just don't want you to do it.' I mean, there has to be some sort of a reason."
Janzen doesn't expect fallout and anticipates that the project will move forward.
"We haven't heard from anybody yet," he said. "Most of those groups have been brought into the loop fairly early on."
It was in 2008 that the full extent of the cemetery came to light, when the district hired a consulting firm to investigate. Based on research, the cemetery lines were drawn.
The Business Practices and Consumer Protection Authority - the government body that oversees cemeteries - designated a portion of the site a cemetery, and the rest fell under the Heritage Conservation Act, which will allow the district to proceed with construction under certain conditions.
The district has been attempting for more than a decade to replace the aging New Westminster Secondary school. The cemetery situation has turned the project into one of the most complicated and expensive capital projects the Ministry of Education has ever undertaken. Recently, the ministry announced funding for a new elementary school and middle school for New Westminster.
However, many parents feel the new high school is long overdue. Project manager Jim Alkins told The Record in April that the soil conditions at the high school site were still being investigated, explain-ing why the high school replacement was held up while the other school projects pushed forward.
"We need to do some additional investigations on the site conditions so that we have more certainty around the cost of construction," Alkins said at the time.
