Rocky View Schools (RVS) board chair Colleen Munro remains optimistic that a new K-8 school in Cochrane’s Sunset Ridge community will open for the 2016/17 academic year.
The provincial government announced last week that it would abandon the Alberta P3 school project, but would continue building the 19 new schools under its own procurement method, which could result in delays for some of the schools’ openings.
Munro said RVS asked the government to manage the Sunset school project, as this would essentially equate to the province taking over a work in progress, and that if RVS took over the project, it would have to start from scratch and potentially cause a delay.
“We know that the community needs this school sooner rather than later,” said Munro, adding that it was too early in the project to comment on whether it would in fact open in 2016 as planned.
Munro said that if the Sunset school did not open in 2016, it would be possible to house students at Mitford School in portables for another year, but that that was not the preferred solution to Cochrane’s ever-increasing student overcrowding issue.
Munro said more portables would be set up at Mitford this summer.
Alberta’s infrastructure minister Wayne Drysdale has said that the province’s new approach to constructing the 19 new schools would save taxpayers close to $14 million.
The P3 model was a public-private partnership, intended to fund the new schools from both sides of the spectrum, but Alberta infrastructure had only received a single bid as of last October, when the government said there could be delays in construction due to a perceived lack of interest from private companies.
