Langford’s newest middle school won’t be ready for September

This story was originally published in The Westshore newsletter, Aug. 11, 2022.

Centre Mountain Lellum Middle School is supposed to open this September for students in grades 6 through 8. But parents were told this week that it will not be ready for the first day of school—and maybe not until November.

The Sooke School District told parents Wednesday that supply chain delays have pushed back the occupancy day, which had been planned for Sept. 1. The 520 students registered to attend Centre Mountain Lellum have been distributed between Spencer and Dunsmuir middle schools. Some Grade 7 students, the smallest cohort, will be placed in PEXSISEN Elementary for the first few months of the school year.

Kristen McGillivray, communications manager for the district, said absorbing the 520 students will put things where they were last year—that is, with a lot of portable classrooms. Sooke School District schools are pushing capacity and desperately need the new space. At the end of last year the district was at 120% capacity, and had 55 portable classrooms in use. The Ministry of Education’s goal is for districts to operate at 95% capacity.

Items yet to arrive at Centre Mountain Lellum include fire suppression equipment and some windows. The delays are out of the control of the contractor, Farmer Construction, and the school district, McGillivray said.

The other factor in this delay is a labour shortage, something we investigated this spring. Part of the source of the shortage in the construction industry is, ironically, the utter unavailability of housing for crews being recruited from out of town to supplement the local workforce. Unavoidably, COVID infections have caused people to miss work.

In hindsight, it was a lofty goal to build two new schools in the midst of a pandemic, she said, but budgets and contracts were in motion before global supply chain implications of the pandemic were known.

PEXSISEN Elementary, on the same campus as Centre Mountain Lellum, is ready, and students will start school Sept. 6 as planned. At least three other new schools are in the works throughout the Westshore as the District works to absorb the mushrooming population.