School district officials in North Vancouver are hoping students will be walking through the doors of the new Argyle Secondary before Christmas break.
“We’re targeting occupancy sometime in November, December,” Mark Thompson, project manager, told trustees during a capital project update Oct. 8. The exact move-in date hasn’t been set yet, but, “It’s getting close,” he said.
Interior cabinets, floors and doors have been installed and “we’ve received our first shipment of desks,” he said.
Additional furniture and equipment for the new school will be delivered over the next month, said Thompson.
Completion of the gym is running slightly behind schedule, he said.
The gymnasium in the new high school will be made up essentially of three gyms, each the size of a basketball court, that can be separated or joined together with movable doors, he said.
Once students and teachers move into the building, it will likely take four to six months for contractors to remove hazardous material from the old school to ready that for demolition, said Thompson.
Work will then begin on preparing the site for a new artificial turf field being funded by the District of North Vancouver.
The opening date for the $61-million high school has been delayed a few months from predictions in the spring that the school would be ready for the start of school this September. The original budget for the school when it was announced in 2016 was just over $49 million. But costs ballooned in the interim and the province later agreed to kick in more funding.
The new Argyle Secondary is being built for a capacity of 1,300 students and has been constructed using a concept of “learning communities” said Thompson, featuring 10 blocks of four classrooms each that surround a collaborative space.
Meanwhile, work on construction of the new Handsworth Secondary, which has now been underway for six months, is progressing according to plan, said school district staff.
The fixed-price $56.1-million build contract with Ventana Construction requires the new school to be finished by July 2022, with a plan for students to move into the school for the start of school in September 2022.
After that, demolition of the old school on the site is scheduled for the fall of 2022.
Handsworth will be a bigger school than Argyle when it is completed and is being built to a capacity of 1,400 students.
The total budget for the new Handsworth Secondary is $68.7-million – $6 million over its original budget of $62.3 million.
Currently there are no plans to build a replacement track for the old six-lane track being lost as part of construction of the new Handsworth, to the consternation of local track athletes. The estimated cost of a new track has ranged from $2.5 million to $3.8 million, which was not included in the project budget.
Plans have included leaving enough space for a track, however, said school district staff, so that one can be built later if another level of government comes up with the funding.
