On June 4, the Hanover School Division (HSD) board of trustees revealed that superintendent Shelley Amos had completed and submitted the division’s capital plan to the province. The plan, she said, includes the request for an additional vocational school, like the Steinbach Regional Secondary School (SRSS).
The move is in response to the fact that, despite of additions to the facility over the years, the SRSS continues to outgrow its space. Currently, according to Amos, the high school is the largest in the entire province, both in terms of square footage and student enrolment.
Upon reaching out to the division for further comment, The Citizen received a response indicating that it’s still too early in the process to discuss where such a secondary school would be located, were it to be approved.
Niverville mayor Myron Dyck knows exactly where he’d like to see a secondary school located.
“Niverville is the fastest growing community in the province, and the second largest in the southeast,” Dyck says. “Part of that growth comes from the many young families who have seen the benefit of moving to Niverville, which will hopefully, in a few short years, push our population over 10,000.”
For this reason, he says, it would make complete sense to view Niverville as the best possible location for the next vocational school. From a bussing perspective, he says Niverville could cover students from the north and west areas of the division while the SRSS covers the south and east areas.
“Coupling this with the new state-of-the-art movie studio [coming to] town, Niverville becomes a prime location for a new vocational school in the Hanover School Division,” Dyck adds. “This vocational school would not take away from what is already offered in Steinbach but would instead add to it, offering programs in vocations such as filmmaking, aerospace, or coding, to name a few.”
Of course, any such request is at the mercy of the province, which receives capital funding requests from 30 school divisions around Manitoba at this time of year. And should the province approve this major capital expenditure in HSD, there’s no telling just when they would authorize a build.
Ron Schuler, MLA for Springfield-Ritchot, lauds HSD for being proactive in its request. To ask for another vocational school, he says the division will have had to provide statistical proof of current growth and reasonable projections for continued growth.
“The [province] won’t build a school on speculation, because they are very expensive,” Schuler says.
Schuler isn’t overly optimistic about the new NDP government’s position on new schools, though. Historically speaking, based on the record of the previous NDP government, he says no new schools were built. He notes that when the PCs formed government in 2016, approximately nine schools were built in the following six years, including in Niverville, Steinbach, and Hanover more broadly.
During the previous provincial election, he says that the PCs promised an additional nine schools by 2027, whereas the NDP’s most recent budget only accounts for two of those schools.
Should the province approve HSD’s request, Schuler agrees that Niverville would make a prime location for obvious reasons.
“Where is the heavy growth [in HSD] taking place?” asks Schuler. “The province would look at that kind of stuff. They work together with the school division and push them on the rationale. I would suggest that Niverville is one of those areas that should be looked at. This will not be an emotions-based decision. This will definitely be a data-driven decision.”
That data-driven analysis won’t focused solely on population growth, but also on infrastructure and land availability.
Here, too, Niverville is gearing up for a reconstruction of the highway on the west side of town to accommodate heavier traffic flows. This section would certainly be an area for consideration.
Should Niverville’s request to annex land on the east side be approved by the province, this could also work in favour of the community.
“High schools are becoming regional centres,” Schuler says. “They are very expensive to build and very expensive to staff, so you want to make it very regional so that it has good access for the entire region to bring students in. And Niverville would be very well positioned.”
Of course, he adds, at this stage of the game, even if the province should approve the request, it’s not something that would likely happen quickly. From original request to ribbon-cutting, he says, five to six years generally pass.
