New school coming to Neepawa area

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This article was published 25/03/2023 (1077 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A new vocational facility will be built in the Beautiful Plains division after the Manitoba government promised Friday to construct three additional schools across the province.

The other two facilities are a Grade 9 to 12 school in the Seine River division and a kindergarten to Grade 8 school in the River East Transcona division.

The three schools add to the 20 educational facilities this government promised in 2019.

Beautiful Plains Supt. Jason Young, who attended Friday’s news conference in Winnipeg, said he was ecstatic about the announcement since a new school has been on the division’s wish list for some time, he told the Sun.

“Every year, we submit a five-year capital plan to the province, so a new vocational school has been part of our five-year capital request for two years now,” he said.

“And more recently, over the last couple months, the province has been in contact with us, talking about this … talking about our numbers and our growth in the community of Neepawa. We weren’t sure when or if that announcement would be coming until quite recently. So yeah, it’s exciting news.”

While Young couldn’t specify where the new Grade 9 to 12 school will be located, he confirmed the facility will be built in the “Neepawa area,” with the hope of accommodating students who live in town and in the smaller surrounding communities as well.

The Neepawa area has, in general, undergone a dramatic population spike throughout the past decade, with a lot of this community growth fuelled by Filipino families arriving to work at the HyLife Foods hog processing plant.

To help carve out some space for an incoming wave of pupils, Beautiful Plains even opened a new Grade 5 to 8 facility (Neepawa Middle School) in early 2020 to take some pressure off Neepawa Area Collegiate, which had been dealing with considerable student overflow.

While Young said student enrolment plateaued during the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the division’s population has been “skyrocketing” yet again now that all major health mandates have been lifted.

“We’re probably up 100 kids this past year,” he said.

“And right now, we’re growing at about 10 to 12 kids a month in Neepawa, so that’s kind of where we’re at.”

The new Grade 9 to 12 school will help realign student distribution throughout Neepawa, with the building that currently houses Neepawa Middle School and Neepawa Area Collegiate being reorganized into a Grade 4 to 8 facility, Young added.

“Depending what our growth looks like over the next couple years, our current elementary school [Hazel M. Kellington School] will become a K to 3 school, our middle school and high school will be a 4 to 8 school, and then this [new school] will house our 9 to 12 students academically, vocationally and hopefully in the performing arts area as well.”

Although he couldn’t provide a timeline of when construction on the new school will begin, the province claimed on Friday that all 23 schools will be operational by September 2027.

Of the 20 schools the province promised in 2019, six facilities are still under development. This includes a kindergarten to Grade 8 school in the Brandon School Division and a Division scolaire franco-manitobaine school also located here.

Government Services Minister James Teitsma revealed on Friday that the construction of the remaining nine schools will be made possible through a bundled public-private partnership procurement.

Teitsma said this model will allow the Manitoba government to build the nine schools through a single tender and thereby complete the construction faster, bringing the projects across the finish line “two years ahead of schedule.”

However, not everyone was pleased with the province using a public-private partnership procurement for this project.

Manitoba Liberal Leader Dougald Lamont said it’s a “rip-off for school divisions and ultimately for taxpayers” based on a report his party obtained detailing the process.

“This isn’t about saving money or [getting] things done better, it is about cutting corners,” Lamont wrote in a statement Friday.

“The KPMG document made it clear that contractors get to cherry pick the profitable contracts parts while leaving taxpayers with the heavy lifting costs. The PCs might laud this project as a cost-saving measure in the short term, but taxpayers are going to be on the hook for higher costs for maintenance in the future.”

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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