By Kellah Lavoie

School division excited by new roofs

Feb 27, 2011 | 10:34 AM

Four schools in the Saskatchewan Rivers School Division are getting a facelift.

Kinistino School, Meath Park School, Wesmor Community High School and Carlton Comprehensive High School are getting provincial money to have part of their roofs repaired.

Mike Hurd, superintendent of facilities with the school division, said it is something they don’t want to fall behind on.

“When you have as many buildings as we have, there’s an ongoing need to do roof maintenance and roof replacement,” he said.

“When we do a roof on a facility, it’s a large facility we typically wouldn’t do the whole roof, we wouldn’t get funding for the whole thing.”

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They are doing the sections that need it most. Kinistino’s gym and home economics lab, a section of Meath Park, Wesmor’s industrial arts area and the central core of Carlton will be where the work is done.

Hurd said in some cases, like Carlton where the building is 300,000 square feet in size, they have been working on getting the roof done for 10 years.

“This will finish that roof off now, so this area that we are doing will be the last area on Carlton for hopefully a number of years because it will be all completely re-roofed,” he said.

The work doesn’t come cheap.

He said work on the type of roofing they use costs about $300 a square metre. It means each section of roof that gets repaired costs the school division $200,000 to $300,000.

While the school division did not do any roofing last year, the year before they had 10. On their five-year-plan, there are another 10 to 15 to get done.

“We’ve actually had roofs in the past where we thought we were ok for a year or two and then depending on the type of winter we had and the type of fall, all of a sudden that roof shows up that it’s in need of replacement and you thought you had a year or two left on it,” he said.

“For example, West Central School, it’s a little school west of P.A. , we thought we had a few years and then all of a sudden the spring came and the roof, you know the roof membrane was starting to buckle and it had just given up the go, so we had to replace it.”

The issue at West Central happened about three years ago and has only happened once, but it’s not something they want to see again.

“It is important for us to stay on top of our roofs because they protect everything that’s under it right, so we have an ongoing audit of our roof conditions so that we know where our worst ones are and where our best ones are ,” Hurd said.

The money for the repairs is part of a $60 million pledge made by the provincial government for improvements and renovations to 120 schools across Saskatchewan.

klavoie@panow.com