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Work underway to open Cedar for high school students next year

NANAIMO – Trustees approved work on Cedar school in April.

With the go-ahead given by Nanaimo school district trustees in late April, district staff are working to get Cedar Secondary School up and running in time for the 2016 school year.

The school was being converted to an elementary school as part of the 10-year facilities plan, but the current board reversed that decision.

According to the district, steps to implement conversion include the establishment of a school construction committee and a school consolidation working group and ongoing consultation with architect firm KMBR Architects Planners Inc.

General instruction rooms can be easily converted back, according to an update provided by Pete Sabo, school district director of planning and operations, at the May 13 business committee meeting.

“There’s a number of improvements made to those rooms that are perfectly suitable for secondary,” Sabo said. “We’ve added extra network, extra outlets, mounts and we’re going to get equipment for ceiling projectors, etc., so basically, some of the work just results in upgraded classrooms.”

Sabo said the architect had its attention on areas that were presenting challenges, including conversion of rooms back to science labs.

“There’s the business ed rooms, which had been made smaller with a collaboration area in between, so we’re looking at models that could see us keeping that configuration or using another room in the school as business, and then technology space, which was three rooms divided into two, and we’re having discussions around what that technology might look like,” he said.

Approximately $1 million has been set aside in the school district’s 2015-16 budget for the work.

Sabo said a school construction committee meeting is expected to be held in late May or early June.



Karl Yu

About the Author: Karl Yu

After interning at Vancouver Metro free daily newspaper, I joined Black Press in 2010.
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