St. Patrick Catholic School (photo by Shaun Penner)

By Liam Verster

St. Patrick Catholic School

Plans move forward to build new school on St. Patrick Catholic School property

Feb 20, 2020 | 1:11 PM

The future of St.Patrick Catholic School has been decided, and the Grande Prairie and District Catholic School (GPDCS) Board will present to the Province the plan on building a new school in its place.

The school was temporarily closed in 2017, when it was discovered that the building was in need of significant remediations. However, after planning and acquiring tenders, the modernization of the school was found to be too expensive, and the plan was cancelled.

In January 2020, the Government decided to let the Grande Prairie and District Catholic School Board choose how to move forward with the $17-million in funding that was already set aside for the project.

Michael Ouellette, Chair of the GPDCS Board, says they had a couple options: build a new school on the existing St. Patrick School property, build a new school on the existing St. Gerard School property, or build an extension on to St. Gerard School.

“Through lots of discussion and lots of information there was a couple motions made, and the motion that passed was new construction, of a 400 student school, on existing St. Patrick School land.”

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When the options were first presented, it seemed like the extension of St. Gerard would have been the most cost efficient. However, when the details all came together, it turned out the opposite was true.

“Building onto St. Gerard wasn’t going to work, because of the modernization would have also taken into effect that we would have had to upgrade much of our existing school, and we would have been way over our budget.”

The decision was made at the School Board meeting on Tuesday, February 18. During that meeting, the board had asked for public input to help guide their decision.

“We had some great presentations from the public on different ideas, and of course we took in their considerations, but in the end the Board made a decision for the long term.”

While the decision has been made to make the new 400 student school a French Immersion school, there are still specific details regarding programs that need to be decided.

In a letter to parents, Karl Germann, the Superintendent of Schools for GPDCS says they need to decide between classifying Ecole St. Gerard as a Grade 4-8 school and St. Patrick as a Pre-Kindergarten to Grade 3 school, or having K-5 at Ecole St. Gerard and Grades 6-8 at St. Patrick.

The letter says that decision will be made very soon, as it will have an impact the design of the new St. Patrick School.

The new school will be French Immersion only, which allows the GPDCS to make the new O’Brien Lake School an English-track school. O’Brien Lake school is still in the planning stage, but is expected to go into tender in either May or June, with construction beginning in the fall.

The current St. Patrick Catholic school will need to be torn down before construction on the new school can begin. At this point, it’s unknown when that work will take place, though the School Board expects the construction of the new building will take 15 months to complete once started.