Plans for Sharbot Lake K-12 school ramping up

Jeff Green | Feb 17, 2011

There was much community interest early last summer when the Limestone District School Board’s Program and Accommodation Review Committee (PARC) process for the Sharbot Lake Family of Schools completed its work and the Board of Trustees announced that a new K-12 school would be built in Sharbot Lake by the fall of 2013.

Ever since then there has been silence from the board, publicly at least.

Behind the scenes, however, planning has proceeded, and this week Ann Goodfellow, the trustee for the northern schools, let is be known that an architect has been chosen for the project.

“Within the next month or so a design team will be appointed. The team will include the principals from Hinchinbrooke and Sharbot Lake Public Schools and Sharbot Lake High School, as well as parent reps from those schools, the architect, Roger Richard from the board office and other board staff as needed,” said Ann Goodfellow.

Goodfellow will chair the meetings, which will take place about twice a month until a preliminary design is completed. The representatives from the schools will bring comments and suggestions from their school communities to the meetings, and once the preliminary design is complete later this spring or summer, at least two public meetings will be held before the architect starts working on the final design.

“We are going to be open to all sorts of suggestions, but in the end we can only build what we have funding to build,” Goodfellow said.

The final design will undergo a detailed costing review before it is sent to the Ministry of Education for final approval, a process that will take a considerable amount of time.

The new Sharbot Lake comprehensive school will replace Sharbot Lake High and Intermediate schools, Sharbot Lake Public School, and Hinchinbrooke Public School in Parham.

Land O’Lakes Public School in Mountain Grove and Clarendon Central School in Plevna will remain open.

The new school is slated to be built on or around the current parking lot at Sharbot Lake High School, and the existing school will be demolished.