Virginia Park Elementary delay 'unacceptable,' says school council

A school council in the east end of St. John's wants to know why preparation work for a new school has stopped.

Virginia Park Elementary is going to be replaced by a new building which will sit right next to the current site.

Construction of the new building was originally supposed to be complete in time for the school to open in the fall of 2016.

Peter Whittle, who chairs the Virginia Park school council, said parents have been fighting for decades to get the new school built, and it seemed like that was about to become a reality.

Whittle said workers had started to prepare the site, but then suddenly stopped and have yet to resume.

"It's been six weeks going into seven weeks since there's been any activity on the site," he said.

"My concern is that it isn't going to start up again before Christmas and then we'll have snow and it won't start until the spring."

Not good enough

Whittle said the delay may have to do with the history of what the site was previously used for.

He said that his understanding is that the area was used as a battery dumping site by the American military, and that acid has seeped into the ground which caused lead contamination.

Whittle said that there was three or four times as much lead in the soil as was originally thought, which may be contributing to the delays.

Despite the possible explanation, Whittle believes that the recent delays are unacceptable given that the school is already 10 years behind schedule.
     
"If this is sitting with an engineer's office or it's sitting with Treasury Board because they need some extra money, [then] they really need to move on it because the community deserves better than an open pit," he said.

"We should be seeing steel going in here right now and it's unacceptable that we've had these delays."

According to Whittle, funding of the project was awarded at $3.3 million and $1.6 million of that was for remediation of the site. He thinks that they've come close to spending that at this point and are looking for approval to spend more.