Timberlea, Middle Sackville, Port Wallace, Bedford and Clayton Park getting new schools

The Nova Scotia government has revealed the locations of four highly anticipated new schools for the Halifax area.

At a briefing Tuesday, staff with the departments of Education and Public Works announced the following details:

• Timberlea/Bay View family of schools: a pre-primary to Grade 8 school on Maple Grove Avenue with capacity for 800 students.
• Middle Sackville/Millwood family of schools: an elementary/junior high at an unspecified site.
• Port Wallace/Woodlawn family of schools: an elementary/junior high in the Lake Charles area.
• Bedford/West Bedford and Charles P. Allen families of schools: an elementary/junior high on Hammonds Plains Road close to the junction of Highway 102.

The province also confirmed the location of a new junior high school for the communities of Clayton Park and Fairview, which was initially announced in 2018. It will be built on Radcliffe Drive and have capacity for 950 students in grades 6 to 9.

'We're gonna be back again'

Doug Hadley, a spokesperson for the Halifax Regional Centre for Education, said the schools are "all badly needed," and he welcomed the news.

He said the student body across the Halifax region will surpass 60,000 students this year.

"We're growing leaps and bounds. We've grown by 9,000 students in the last five years," Hadley told reporters after the government announcement.

He said HRCE expects growth to continue on a similar trajectory.

The province says the new schools are expected to add more than 5,000 spaces to the system.

"If you think of it that way, we're gonna be back again with more requests in the next few years," said Hadley.

Making progress

The announcement came more than a year after the Tory government allocated $50 million to buy land for the schools and other projects, but at that time it would not say where they would go or what grades the schools would serve.

Since then, Education Minister Becky Druhan has repeatedly deflected questions about where the new schools would go by saying it would hurt negotiations to share any information.

"We are making sure that we make the most of taxpayer dollars and are responsible as we navigate a competitive real estate market — that meant staying mum on where these new schools would be," she said.

She told reporters Tuesday that it has been hard to stay quiet.

"Today I am elated to say that we are making progress," she added.

Druhan said Public Works made the call that they were far enough along in their negotiations that the general locations could be made public. 

Still in negotiations

In some cases, the province has purchased the land. In Timberlea, it purchased 4.7 hectares for $16.75 million and in Clayton Park-Fairview 2.3 hectares has been purchased for $2.25 million.

The province is still negotiating deals for land for the other schools.

Officials with the Department of Public Works could not provide a definitive timeline for completing negotiations. They said it would take five to six years to complete the schools, once the sites have been secured.

"I hope to have many project updates throughout the year," Druhan said.

The communities announced Tuesday are among those identified by HRCE two years ago when it made a request for six to eight new schools based on increased development and population growth.

"It is no easy feat to find and acquire land in a growth area," Druhan said, adding that it takes "vision" and "patience."

Modulars pick up some of the slack

Hadley said to keep up with growth, HRCE has added 169 modular units to schools over the past five years. Most of those units, he said, are in the communities the province chose for the new schools.

"We've brought on more capacity than if you'd just built stand-alone schools," he said.

Hadley said the modular classrooms have been a good "medium-term solution," with the benefit that they can be built quickly and moved from site to site as needed as demographics change. 

Druhan also pointed to modulars as part of the solution to keeping pace with population growth.

Opposition criticism

NDP Leader Claudia Chender said she was pleased to finally have information about where these schools will go, but she was wary of the long timeline, and said, "we need a lot more."

"HRM has over 50 per cent of our population and huge pressures," she said to reporters.

Chender said she was disappointed that her riding of Dartmouth South was omitted from the plan. Dartmouth South includes the Southdale/Woodside area, which was one of the growth areas identified by HRCE in its request for more schools in 2022. 

The provincial electoral ridings that did get new schools include two that are held by the Liberals and two held by the Tories. The junior high in Clayton Park is in a Liberal riding, and that community was chosen by the previous Liberal government.

Rafah DiCostanzo is the MLA for that riding, Clayton Park West, and said the government needs to come up with a better process for choosing sites for new schools so that it doesn't take so long.

"This should not have happened. Just like they allocate pieces of parkland when a development is happening, they should allocate land for a school, in advance," she told reporters.

She said the city and province need to collaborate with each other and developers.

"There is no land if we don't plan," she said.