The New Westminster Secondary School replacement project has hit another major road block.

The school district announced last week it has postponed the opening of the new high school until September 2020 – one year later than anticipated.

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“That was a very ambitious plan,” New Westminster school district superintendent Pat Duncan said of the initial plan to open the school in September 2019.

Funding for the long-awaited replacement of New Westminster Secondary School was announced in June 2016. At the time, the Ministry of Education said the school would be ready for students by December 2019, but that didn’t sit well with Duncan.

Instead, he said he pushed for an earlier opening date of September 2019 to avoid a mid-year move for students, but the three firms chosen to come up with design proposals for the school said it just wasn’t feasible.

“Based on the feedback from the three proponents it became very, very clear that if we’re to continue with this very ambitious plan, we’d be ending up putting a lot of dollars into building quickly rather than building the very best school,” he said.

Now the goal is to have the school ready by May 2020 so the school district can start moving supplies into the building in time for the opening four months later. This means by the time students walk through the doors of the new high school, everything inside will be complete, Duncan said.

“It will not look like a construction site; it will look like a brand new, beautiful, state-of-the-art secondary school,” he added.

When Fraser River Middle School opened in September 2016 after the project was postponed a year (it was supposed to open in September 2015), parts of the school were still unfinished. There were no books in the library and some of the school supplies hadn’t arrived yet.

But Duncan is adamant that won’t happen at the new high school.

“We will be fully ready to start the school year, and that gives us four full months to make sure that, certainly, the interior of the building is fully ready, and I hope much of exterior will be as well as far as landscaping, but that obviously comes secondary,” he said.

The three design firms have until November to complete their proposals. Once finished, the district’s selection committee will have one month to choose a winning proposal. After that, construction is expected to start – either this December or early 2018.

In the new year, the community will also get a second chance to share its thoughts on the project and the chosen design during a second round of community consultations. Unlike the consultations that took place last year, this time around, the community will get to see what the new school will look like. Folks will be able to share their thoughts on things like bike pathways, roadways, plazas and other community spaces around the school, Duncan said.

“We’ll be asking for very specific feedback on the school, including the construction mitigation process,” he added. “Any feedback we can get to make sure that during the two-and-a-half-year timeline that we’re there, how are we going to make sure that the area is still accessible – the arena, the theatre – all that will be part of the consultation process.

“We want to do it right.”

For updates on the project and more details, go to http://newwestschools.ca/nwss-replacement-project.

MORE ABOUT THE NWSS SITE:

As the three design firms finish their proposals, the folks at Golder Associates continue to study the New Westminster Secondary School site in preparation for construction. Part of this work included an archeological study of the area to determine where construction will be able to take place.

Why? Because the New Westminster Secondary School site was once a public cemetery called Douglas Road Cemetery, which extended south from 10th Avenue along Eighth Street to Dublin Street.

The cemetery was in operation from 1860 to 1920 and was first used as a pioneer graveyard. Eventually, it was used to bury the bodies of the poor, prisoners, stillborn babies and mentally ill patients from Woodlands and Essondale – which later became Riverview. The land was also used by Chinese, Sikh and First Nations communities to bury their dead.

There are two protected areas that intersect the high school property – official cemetery land and Heritage Conservation Act land.

The official cemetery land is well documented and has been identified with clear boundaries.

The conservation area does not meet the strict criteria needed to be designated a cemetery site. Under the Heritage Conservation Act, the district must ensure that any burial grounds within the conservation area remain untouched.

The school district and the province promised that no part of the new high school will be built on known burial grounds.