School board waits for Ministry approval

By Louise Sproule

VANKLEEK HILL– Construction of the new Vankleek Hill Collegaite Institute is supposed to begin in April, but the Upper Canada District School Board says it is waiting for Ministry of Education approval.

The design of the new VCI, the tender documents and the expropriation process have all been completed in full, says Jeremy Hobbs, Chief Information and Facilities Officer with the Upper Canada District School Board.

The board has pre-qualified eligible general contractors and in short, is set to begin construction.

Construction was set to start in April 2009 and the school was scheduled to open for classes in September 2011.

But according to Hobbs, the board is waiting for completion of the last stage of the process – getting approval from the Ontario Ministry of Education.

Hobbs says the board made its submission for approval in mid-December of 2008 but is still working through the process with Ministry staff, although, Hobbs says that the board feels “some direction is imminent.”

The school board showed the new school plans to the Vankleek Hill Collegiate Institute community late last year. Expropriation of land on which to build the school was scheduled for completion in February of this year.

Background:

Funding in the amount of $10.8 million for the new school was announced in June 2007. The school board received an additional .9-million dollars in September 2008 from the Ministry of Education, bringing the total amount available for construction to $11.7 million, but at the end of last year, the school board was hoping for still more funds to pay for demolition and land acquisition costs.

Last year, the board said that while original construction estimates were higher than expected, they had dropped as the results of the economic crisis.

The size of the new school will be 57,000 square feet, a reduction from an earlier 67,000-square-foot plan.

The new school will include portables. Certain elements of the school, such as a wooden gym floor, will only be part of the new school if community fundraising comes up with the funds.

Grade 7 and 8 students will ultimately be moving to VCI, but no date has been announced yet for this change, which is part of the board’s Boundary 2020 initiative.