By Jonathan Charlton
jonathan@peicanada.com

With more capital projects to do than it has money for, the Department of Education has again delayed an expansion to Montague Intermediate School’s industrial arts and music facilities which the school’s principal said is badly needed.
There's no guarantee it will happen next year either.
The school has been planning with an architect and engineer for two-and-a-half years. The blueprints have been finalized and shovels are ready to go in the ground.
Originally the expansion was to have taken place at the same time as the construction of the new Montague High School. However costs came in higher than expected and the project was delayed in hopes there would be money in this year’s capital budget for it to be done by the start of the 2011/12 school year.
“It’s frustrating from our perspective because there are 350 kids at the school and another 150 from our feeder schools that take part in industrial arts, so they are going up to what I would call a derelict building," Principal Kevin Stonefield said.
"If it wasn’t good enough for 650 kids why is it enough for the junior high?
“I’ve got a teaching staff that had spent a lot of time, myself included, coming up with plans to develop a modern day industrial arts lab that would serve the purposes not only with what the curriculum is asking for now but the future curriculum,” Mr Stonefield said
The walk to and from the high school eats into class time and is a safety hazard in icy conditions, he said. It also undermines the community’s confidence in the system.
“I think there’s a lot of people who are disappointed and a lot of people who are disillusioned with the process because they felt when that high school closed that this was a given that our students would be given programming that’s necessary, the space for programming that’s necessary and it never happened.”
Music teacher Jonathan MacInnis said students are playing music in a room that was never meant for that purpose. There aren’t smaller practice rooms or a room for his office, instruments spill out into the hallways during band practices because of a lack of storage space and the room lacks the right design to accommodate the loud sounds of 70-member strong band.
“It would sound much more flattering for the band and be good for everybody’s hearing too if we had the right sized room,” he said.
Six years ago there were only 25 kids in the band program. Now there are 110, divided into about 40 junior and 70 senior but the room is only meant for 30 students, he said.
Deputy Minister of Education Sandy MacDonald said the expansion is a priority for the department but tough choices have to be made with a limited budget.
“For budget cabinet this coming year, we put all the (16 projects) we thought we would need, including Montague Intermediate. All those requests came to $18 million which in normal years would have been laughed at because usually your capital budget is around $5 million but the government has been spending more the last few years.”
The department received $11,681,000 and had to decide the fairest way to distribute the money across the board, he said.
That money marks a 39 per cent decrease from last year, when the department received $19,088,800. The total capital budget among all departments fell 11 per cent to $137,690,100 with only Health PEI and the Department of Innovation, Environment, Energy and Forestry and Tourism and Culture seeing increases. The Department of Education ranks third in capital spending.
The cost of the Montague Intermediate expansion would make up 0.9 per cent of the entire capital budget.
Four projects took up $8.5 million of the Department’s funding. The renovations to the Three Oaks High School are a multi year project and this year required $5.2 million.
Getting Miscouche school ready for kindergarten was originally slated to cost $400,000 but jumped to $2.1 million to solve overcrowding problems.
“They were using their library for a classroom, they were using their computer room for a classroom. So it wasn’t just kindergarten, kindergarten brought to light a problem they’d got used to dealing with over the years.
“If we had $11 million and no problem with Miscouche that would have given us an enormous amount of leeway.”
There were cost overruns at St Augustine as well, similar to what happened at Montague High School, he said, which ate up another $850,000.
The Department is also spending $1 million to begin planning and land purchases for a new high school in Souris, which Mr MacDonald said the community has been waiting for for quite some time.
Of the remaining $3 million, the board will spend $1.4 million on new school buses, $100,000 on the trade programs of all schools and $500,000 to refresh computers. One million dollars is kept as a contingency fund in case other issues of mold or overcrowding arise.
“We were hoping this year we would be ale to do Montague Intermediate, it’s a big priority for the Eastern School District and it is for us as well. But we just couldn’t find the money this year.
“It’s unfortunate the kids will spend another year going to the old centre for their trades program. It’s not what they would want, not what we would want, but (the project is) delayed, not cancelled.”
He said the expansion will be resubmitted in next year’s capital budget.