Bluewater District School Board is continuing its search for the right site to build the new Kincardine District Senior School.
Superintendent of Business Services and Treasurer Rob Cummings says that “When you’re looking for pieces of land, it is difficult to find the appropriate size [of] land for a senior school of this size, especially in an urban setting.”
The building will have a capacity for 881 pupils, and replace the current KDSS, which is a facility for students in Grades 7-12.
BWDSB was approved for funding by the Ministry of Education to build a new Kincardine District Senior School as a part of the Captial Priorities Funding program in 2019-2020.
The Ministry has committed almost $26.5 million toward the project.
The school board is looking to find the perfect site, and they have a few options in mind.
The board is also weighing if it’s worth finding a parcel of land that doesn’t have immediate access to municipal services such as water and wastewater and would have to cover the costs to add those services as the site gets developed.
“Ideally, we would love to have a serviced parcel to do this, but we do not, so we have to look at unserviced parcels and evaluate the feasibility of servicing that parcel within the municipal act, the planning act, and the education act.”
Although the school board can’t move forward on doing any development until a site is chosen, Cummings says that they’re looking forward to one day having a state-of-the-art school.
“This will be a lovely facility. More modern, more technologically facilitating for our students and our staff in terms of their learning environment. We’re very excited about getting this thing going. We’re just in our process right now. We have to find a place.”
Once a site for the new school is chosen, BWDSB would then need to complete a geotechnical review, and then apply for all of the permits to develop their chosen lot.