Seismic upgrades at three elementary schools top the New Westminster school district’s five-year capital plan approved by the board of education recently.
The plan – a wish-list of building projects districts submit to the provincial education ministry every year – has a $4-million seismic upgrade at F.W. Howay Elementary at the top of the list, followed by a $18-million upgrade at Richard McBride Elementary and a $1.25-million upgrade at Lord Tweedsmuir Elementary.
The project at Howay, where the single-storey classroom block was assessed in 2013 as “vulnerable” and at high risk of widespread damage or structural failure during an earthquake, was supported in principle by the ministry in 2013, but funding has yet to be approved.
McBride, where the 1929 classroom and gymnasium blocks have both been assessed at high risk of structural failure during an earthquake, was also supported in 2013 and has also yet to be funded.
Tweedsmuir, meanwhile, is currently assessed to be at low risk of damage during an earthquake.
The local school most vulnerable to damage in an earthquake – New Westminster Secondary – where most of the building has been assessed at the highest risk of widespread damage or structural failure during a quake, is not in the district’s five-year plan because a replacement of the school has already been approved by the ministry, according to district secretary-treasurer Kevin Lorenz.
“We haven’t got funding yet,” he said, “but the ministry is putting the proposal forward to treasury board for funding, so when the ministry says, ‘Yes we support it,’ it comes off the list.”
Lorenz said the ministry doesn’t share the date it puts proposals forward for final funding but he “would assume it would be soon” for the high school project, which is expected to cost somewhere between $110 million and $130 million and be the most complicated and costly replacement project undertaken in the K-12 system to date, according to ministry officials.
The ministry wrote the district a letter in early June, saying it hoped to be in a position to request funding from the provincial treasury by late summer or fall 2015.
But the latest estimate from Education Minister Mike Bernier, who toured NWSS in mid-December, was that the project would not be presented for final government approval until early in the new year.
“I can’t give you anything more specific,” he said after the tour.
