The North Vancouver School District and the province marked the start of a $68.7-million rebuild of Handsworth Secondary in a ground-breaking ceremony Tuesday.
Excavation work on the project is expected to start soon, said Mark Thomson, capital projects manager for the school district. Steel will begin to rise from the site of the new school this summer.
The new secondary school is expected to take two and a half years to build, and be ready for students by September 2022. Demolition of the old school and its replacement with a new grass field is expected to be complete by the spring of 2023.
The school district recently reached an agreement with Ventana Construction on a $56.1-million fixed-price build contract for the new school, said Thomson.
The project is beginning $6 million over its original budget of $62.3 million and will be finished a year beyond its original completion date after escalating project costs resulted in a delay last year.
Rising costs of the school rebuild were partially caused by construction delays, which included "premium costs to construct on the North Shore" due to a limited number of locally available contractors, availability of materials and transportation constraints, according to school district spokeswoman Deneka Michaud in December.
It also included a six-week delay in getting permits from the District of North Vancouver last summer.
Tenders on the rebuild went out in December after the province agreed to boost the project budget. A construction agreement with Ventana was reached recently.
The new Handsworth school will be 139,931 square feet - a reduction of 13,239 square feet from its current footprint. While Handsworth's current enrolment is 1,471, the new school will have a capacity of 1,400.
The rebuild of Handsworth – along with the completion of seismic work at Mountainside – will mark the end of seismic mitigation work on schools in the North Vancouver School District.
Getting approval for a new elementary school on the site of the former Cloverley school is now the school district's top priority for capital construction.
Mark Pearmain, schools superintendent, told trustees Tuesday the school district hopes to receive word on that request from the province soon.
