Morden's new school, Ecole Discovery Trails (EDT), will be ready to welcome students for the start of the new year on September 3rd.
That's the latest from Western School Division (WSD) Superintendent, Stephen Ross, who says the interior is nearly finished.
"Regular classrooms will be good to go. The gymnasium looks fantastic with the new logo on the floor. So yeah, it's pretty exciting."
There will, however, continue to be exterior behind-the-scenes work happening on the site and in the school. Ross assures people that this won't affect learning.
"I don't think there's anything that we have concern about," he noted. "A couple of the instructional spaces will be coming online just a little bit later this fall. The band and Home Ec. rooms will be completed in a couple of weeks. So, there's a different space in the building that they're looking at hosting those programs to just start the school year. Our Industrial Arts shop will be completed by the end of October."
"But yeah, quite excited to get to this stage and really again, super happy with our contractor, WBS construction, who has done a great job in working with that, and our architects as well," added Ross. "It's really nice to have local people invested in building the future here."
He believes the public will be quite impressed with the building, especially with all of the natural light flowing into the various spaces.
"There are some great flexible spaces that teachers have helped design," he added. "Through our whole design process, we brought in teams of teachers to give feedback on spaces, to have them review what was there and to also tell us what they would like to see in that space, and almost everything that our staff and our community asked for is in that building. I think the flow of through the multi-purpose room, through the gymnasium, through the library area is going to be quite impressive."
As for the full-sized track and soccer field, that work is also coming along. It is expected to be complete by the end of September.
The plan was to open the new K-8 dual-track French Immersion school with 500 students in the first year and, while that number fluctuates day-to-day, Ross says the Division is on track to be in and around that number.
Overall, things are nearly set for the start of the new school year in WSD. That includes transportation, which required a new plan to incorporate the additional school.
"Adam Adamson, our transportation supervisor and Yanina, who is the assistant in transportation, they're on their sixth version of a transportation plan for the school division and this one looks great," said Ross. "It's going to be quite efficient and all kids, especially city kids, should get home a little bit earlier this year. But yeah, that might be worth a good look at. There's a significant number of new stops in the city that have had to be put in place to transport kids over to EDT and I think we added one additional bus route this year."
As of interview time, the Division was also fully staffed for the coming year. With replacing outgoing teachers and filling new positions, Ross says WSD will welcome 20 new teachers for 2024/25.
With files from Robyn Wiebe