North Vancouver’s Mountainside Secondary will receive $23.7 million from the province for seismic upgrades.
Education Minister Rob Fleming was in North Vancouver Friday afternoon to make the announcement at Mountainside, which has housed the school district’s alternative education programs for the past five years.
Mountainside is the last school in the North Vancouver school district that engineers have identified as being at high risk of collapse during a major earthquake. It’s the 15th building to be seismically updated or rebuilt in the school district since 2007
Construction on the seismic upgrade project is expected to begin in early 2020 and be completed in 2021.
Students at the school will be able to continue attending Mountainside while the project is underway, said Fleming.
When the work is done, “every single school in North Vancouver will be seismically safe,” said Fleming. So far, Delta is the only other school district that has had seismic work approved or completed for all schools at risk of significant structural damage in the event of a major earthquake.
In North Vancouver, construction work has started on the rebuild of $61 million Argyle Secondary. The school district is also in the planning stages for the $62.3 million rebuild of Handsworth Secondary.
Mountainside was originally known as Balmoral, which opened in 1959 and functioned as a middle school and junior high school until it was closed by the school district in 2009. It reopened as Mountainside in 2013.
Unlike Argyle and Handsworth secondaries, the ministry is not going ahead with a full rebuild of Mountainside. Fleming said a full rebuild of Mountainside would have cost $8 million more than a seismic upgrade. That would be hard to justify given the school’s current enrolment of just over 200 students – about 60 per cent of the building’s capacity, he said.
The funding also includes some updates to the building which have been delayed pending a decision from the ministry on the seismic upgrades.
Around the province, 179 or 347 schools identified at seismic risk have been upgraded or replaced, while 31 schools are either proceeding with construction or in the process of being approved, according to the ministry.
Fleming said the government has been working to speed up the rate at which school seismic projects are approved and completed.
“There were a lot of announcements in the past and no follow through,” he said.
Following the announcement, Fleming said the ministry has also received the North Vancouver School District’s request to build a new elementary school on the former Cloverley school site and will be considering it along with capital requests from other school districts.
“I’ve certainly heard from trustees they’d like to discuss that,” he said.
The school district has asked to build a new "dual track" elementary school with a capacity of 535 students, including French immersion, on that site. The estimated cost of the school is $21.6 million. The school district indicated in June it is hoping to have the project approved and built within four years.
Pressure has been mounting on the school district to get moving on plans for a new elementary school in the area as nearby schools including Ridgeway, Queensbury and Brooksbank are already overcrowded and new developments are expected to bring further population growth.
