Work crews could be on site at Blackie school starting early next month.

Foothills School Division assistant superintendent Drew Chipman says the board was recently able to sign on the dotted line with the contractor for the school's modernization.

"A hundred per cent that's great news," he says. "The bids came in under what the estimates had been, so that was great, we were able to add in some additional pieces that we had asked for separate pricing on just to make sure that we were underneath the budgeted amount and so Shandoff Construction is the successful group and we're looking forward to them getting started as early as first of next month,"

He says they'll do the bulk of the disruptive work during the summer this year and next although there will be crews on site all year.

Chipman says parents, students and staff have been great throughout this past, rather challenging year and expects that'll be the case during the modernization work.

"We've done other modernizations while kids are in school and it's always a little bit of a challenge but our groups have always done a really good job of making sure we minimize the effects," Chipman says.

As with a lot of modernizations most of the really important work won't necessarily be seen.

"There are a lot of major changes but not a lot of them are readily apparent so we're talking about windows, we're talking about floor coverings, we're talking about mechanical systems, we're talking about utilities, so a lot of those things are going to be changed, which are big dollar numbers but you can't really tell from the outside when the mechanical system has changed," he says.

He says there'll be a new admin suite which will look different but a lot of the changes won't be seen.

 

Send us your news tips, story ideas and comments at news@highriveronline.com