The ball diamond in the background of Friday's ground breaking ceremony will be the new home of the Comp. High School. Photo by Curtis Galbraith.

By Curtis Galbraith

Schools

Construction of new Comp. High School to start soon

Nov 1, 2019 | 4:58 PM

Construction is expected to start in a couple of weeks on a replacement for Grande Prairie’s Comp. High School.

The new one will be built at 105 Street and 112 Avenue, just.west and a bit south of the current location There is currently a ball diamond on that corner.

Grande Prairie Public School District Superintendent Sandy McDonald says this site was picked because the district already had the land.

“Schools are built on municipal reserve in the City of Grande Prairie. This existing site here, we (the Public School District) have title to, so it just made sense to come across the street and build here.”

He adds the new school will have room for 1600 students.

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“We project that we will be opening it with about 1400 or 1300 students, so we’ll have a little bit of room to expand there and then the school can actually be built out to accommodate up to 2000 students.”

McDonald says other options had been considered.

“The old building is filled with students, filled with teachers, who do wonderful things every day. But. it’s also filled with a lot of old things. It’s got a very lengthy history. We did quite an extensive study to see if it made economic sense to modernize it and it just made more sense to build a new school and to re-develop this existing site.”

The current Comp. was built in 1964.

Mayor Bill Given calls this a significant project for the city.

“The Composite High School has a long history. I’m a graduate of the Comp., along with many of the other people that were up on the stage (at the sod-turning ceremony). (I’m) looking forward to the future facility and its future in our community is something really exciting.”

At the same time, Given was reminded of his own school days.

“I was a Comp. Tomahawk on the basketball team and so I spent many, many hours in that gym. A lot of my lasting friendships that exist

to this day were formed on that court with the players on my team and I think a lot of people have experiences like that.”

Given adds demolition of the current Comp. may be tied to the demolition of the old Leisure Centre.

“City Council has previously approved money in our capital budget for demolishing the Leisure Centre. We have discussed with the school board and the province the opportunity to do that concurrently with the demolition of the existing Composite High School a few years into the future and we’re currently undertaking a planning process to re-consider what this neighbourhood will look like once we start to have that change in those public facilities .”

The sod-turning ceremony took place on Friday afternoon at the site of the new school.

One of the shovels used in the ceremony (pictured below) was also used for the sud turning when Crystal park School was built almost 40 years ago.

Photo by Curtis Galbraith