‘Generally a mess:’ Crowded classrooms in Harbour Landing

New walls have had to be built and the maximum number of portable classrooms have been installed, but still, the joint-use school in Regina’s Harbour Landing neighbourhood is overcrowded and has been from the beginning.

Parents are frustrated and the divisions have been asking for a new school for years.

In 2020, the province agreed and added funding for a new school in the provincial budget, but shovels haven’t got anywhere near the ground.

The plan has gone through years of work between the public and Catholic school divisions, the provincial government, the city and Dream Developments, the developer that owns land west of Harbour Landing.

In the fall of 2021, Dream brought a proposal to the city’s planning committee and then city council. Its land west of Harbour Landing, called Harbour Landing West, is where the new school would go and was designated as a “special study area” under the city’s planning documents.

The City of Regina has an official community plan, introduced in 2013, that talks about how administration wants the city to grow and separates the growth into phases to keep things proceeding steadily and orderly.

A special study area isn’t included in any phase and is designated as such because there are issues in that spot which would need to be addressed before it could be developed. Dream had a plan to bring Harbour Landing West up into “phase one,” which is the only phase in which development is currently allowed in Regina.

That change would allow neighbourhood development to kick off right away, right alongside the 11-acre school and community centre site – fully serviced and landscaped at a cost to the developer.

When the company started the process, Evan Hunchak, general manager of land development in Regina for Dream, said it felt it had support for the plan from the province, city and the school boards.

“As time progressed, more towards the end of the process, it became known that city council maybe didn’t have the same opinion as the other direction that we were provided,” said Hunchak. “We wouldn’t have spent two years of effort and half a million dollars to $1 million advancing that concept plan had we known it was going to be denied.”

City administration ultimately recommended against approving the change and city council agreed.

During the council meeting in 2021, Hunchak said there was frustration in the company because the recommendations from administration were a surprise. He said the company had undergone a process with the city on this and wasn’t provided any feedback or told there was a concern with the application until two months before.

Hunchak said there was never any conversation with the city administration that Harbour Landing West was an out-of-phase neighbourhood, more about which phase it would be in.

Regina Public Schools seemed to be on the same page as Dream. Adam Hicks, a trustee for the Regina Public School Board, posted a video about it to his Facebook page in the fall. He said the board had good feelings coming from this project for over a year.

“And at the last minute, it seemed that something flipped,” said Hicks.

In meeting documents and discussions, one of the biggest problems appeared to be the new development potentially exacerbating existing drainage and water issues in Harbour Landing and administration worrying about having to take over responsibility if similar issues were to come up in the new development.

But there were also concerns from other developers across the city who chimed in. They were against Dream being able to make the phasing change, arguing it would affect market conditions in their own developments and slow progress overall – even after Dream offered to push back its development in Coopertown to a later phase to compensate. One called the plan an attempt to leverage the need for a school to contravene the phasing plan.

Council rejected the phasing change, but did decide to allow for a school to be built by itself west of Harbour Landing to help with the overcrowding problems. Since Dream owns that land, it said it would work with the city to find an appropriate spot.

The decision by council complicated the work to build the school. Education Minister Dustin Duncan defended the choice on, generally, where to place the school. He said it wasn’t about the development itself, just the area west of Harbour Landing.

“We didn’t tie the need for the school to … whether or not the city was going to approve a development, we just know we need a second joint-use school in that area. We’re limited by the airport to the north, the highway to the south (and) Lewvan to the east and so … within the footprint, there were really limited options,” said Duncan.

Both John Findura, the head of the planning committee, and Bob Hawkins, the city councillor for Harbour Landing, declined to comment for this story. Both voted against the phasing change for Dream.

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The whole project for a new school is currently stuck near the starting point, waiting for a location to be approved.

All parties involved say it’s being worked on.

“Yes, it’s taken quite a little bit of time, but I’m pleased with where it’s at and it’ll be moving forward in the new year,” said Mayor Sandra Masters, indicating she’s expecting an announcement in the next few months that things have been settled.

Hunchak said in the fall that he’d been working on a purchase agreement with the city to sell a parcel of land, which would then need to be approved by city council.

The piece of land suggested by city administration in October 2021 was on Campbell Street at Gordon Road, just a few blocks away from the current school. Hunchak said that’s still the city’s preference.

He said Dream has been trying to be co-operative.

“It’s just taken the city, basically, a year to move this forward. We had indicated our co-operation when our application was denied just over a year ago but things are finally moving here,” said Hunchak.

Duncan also said the province has been waiting for the city to move ahead.

“We’re really just waiting for the city to come forward with a new site. I know that they’re working very hard on that; I’ve talked to the mayor a couple of times,” said Duncan.

The minister said he’s made it very clear with the city that it’s not the province’s role to find and purchase land.

“The city is responsible, under The (Planning and Development) Act, to essentially provide land for a school and so that has been a part of the discussions about making sure that we’re clear that we don’t purchase land,” Duncan said.

However, in this case, Masters said the legislation around municipal reserve doesn’t speak to the city needing to go find land for schools after a community plan and neighbourhood have already been built out.

“In this particular instance we were a partner in solving the problem but on a go-forward basis the City of Regina is not required by legislation to go find land that’s 10 acres. Again, it comes back to proper planning, but where that land doesn’t exist (in a finished neighbourhood) it’s not the city’s responsibility to go find it,” said Masters.

During meetings in the fall of 2021, Hawkins — in his comments about the Dream phasing application and the school — said that while the city has a part to play, education is a provincial responsibility.

Hunchak believes confusion and back and forth between the city and province may be at least one of the reasons this process has taken so long.

If the school were being built in concert with a neighbourhood development, the land would be provided by the developer free of charge, and it would also do all the landscaping for the 11 acres and servicing – connections for things like water, sewer, and roads – free of charge. Dream pegged the cost at $12 million to $15 million but city administration has said in the past that it believes the actual cost to be less than that.

Since this school will be built by itself, all those costs for landscaping and servicing as well as the cost of buying the land from the developer is on the government.

“It’s just generally a mess between the two governments,” Hunchak said with a small laugh. “That doesn’t seem like they’re quite sure how to figure this out without figuring how to move the school forward.”

He said this seems like new territory for the province and city to work through and each side is looking to the other.

“So it’s not necessarily perfectly clear to the average person as to whose responsibility it is. They’re both trying to push some of the responsibility on each other,” said Hunchak.

Masters also talked about the difficulty in finding 11 acres of land together to be able to put the school on, saying it was easier when it was one school alone which needed less space.

“The reality is the city didn’t have 11 acres of land in a continuous, sort of, park space to hand over to the education department. We think we do now and it’ll move forward,” said Masters.

In the meantime, the school in Harbour Landing is overcrowded, with concerns about safety rising as more children enrol.

It all has Kathleen Eisler, a parent and the chair of Harbour Landing School’s community council, frustrated.

“It seems like we are in a standstill and … it’s just politics at this point,” said Eisler. “It seems like there’s a bit of certain developers want certain areas developed first and so it seems like certain people at city council have voted in favour of that as opposed to what is best for their particular community.”

Eisler said they were promised a new school in 2017 when the current school opened at capacity. Then they were promised a new school when the French immersion program was moved away. But nothing has happened.

She said the public school board could wait until next fall to make any drastic changes, but she didn’t know what those changes might be. Hicks, in his video, said there could be rezoning.

“The more frustrating part … was that it is going to be 1,000 students potentially impacted because we continue to grow, we don’t have land, it takes at least three years to build and now, potentially the next school year, we’re going to have to figure out how to transport kids, we might have to transport different classrooms and families might get broken up,” Hicks said.

Eisler doesn’t know whether other schools in the area are going to want to take the extra kids and Hicks said the closest schools don’t have a lot of extra space for more students.

“This has gone on way too long. We need a new school, we know that, and it is going to be really tough making some decisions in the near future,” said Hicks.

With the building just a couple hundred people under load capacity and her being suspicious of the math that officials are using to get there, Eisler said as a parent, it feels like the schools and government are waiting on something tragic to happen before they do anything.

“There’s not someone clicking a counter every day … For me as a parent it’s just too close for comfort,” she said.

When it was announced, the new school was supposed to open in 2024 but everyone consulted for this story said that’s unlikely to still be possible. Estimates say the work is already one to two years behind schedule.