Province ponies up for new Waterdown school
Addition to Mount Hope Elementary also in the plan
After striking out on three previous requests, Hamilton’s public school board has finally hit pay dirt with $22.1 million from the province for a new elementary school in Waterdown to relieve overcrowding at other area schools.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced the funding, along with another $9.1 million for an addition to Mount Hope Elementary School, at Waterdown District High School Friday.
The new Waterdown school is expected to open in September 2027 on land the board bought three years ago by the corner of Skinner Road and Great Falls Boulevard. It will have room for 504 students from kindergarten to Grade 8 and 88 child-care spaces.
“The community is excited. We’re definitely relieved,” said Carly Casey, chair of the school council at Waterdown’s Mary Hopkins Elementary School, which has 10 portable classrooms.
Until the new school is built, trustees are relying on a “short-term accommodation strategy” that will rearrange students, programs, grades and portable classrooms at five schools this September to lessen overcrowding at Mary Hopkins.
The temporary strategy is projected to reduce the number of portable classrooms at Mary Hopkins to three, but add seven portables at Allan A. Greenleaf, for a total of 10, four at Guy B. Brown, for a total of six, and two at Flamborough Centre.
“It gives me peace of mind that there’s an end in sight,” Casey said. “Especially Allan Greenleaf and Guy Brown, they’re taking on a fair amount of students, so to know that it’s just for a short window, I’m sure it will help.”
Graeme Noble, the area’s trustee, said he’s “super excited” about the new school, crediting the board’s success to a decision to submit just two projects for approval for capital priorities funding last fall.
That’s well shy of up to 10 projects in past years, he noted, reflecting Ministry of Education criteria that gave preference to ones that were “shovel ready” and addressed persistent overcapacity at schools in growth areas.
Noble said the new school will take students from east Waterdown and should reduce portables at the five existing schools to a comparatively “insignificant number.”
“Parents have been reaching out to me not asking for a school to be built in the future but that it be built yesterday,” he said. “It’s rare to hear this sort of good news at a time like this and I’m extremely hopeful we can expedite (construction).”
The Mount Hope addition includes 178 student and 88 childcare spaces. Opened in 1953, the school has a 363-student capacity but had 485 students as of the end of October.
“It’s so needed,” area trustee Amanda Fehrman said, noting the school already has four portables, with another three expected to be added this September in anticipation of an additional 100 students.
“Mount Hope’s grown tremendously. I’ve lived there for 19 years and it’s more than doubled in size since I moved in,” Fehrman said, adding the child-care spaces are badly needed.
While Mount Hope has a Kinder seeds
daycare centre, many people must drive their kids to Hamilton or Caledonia for child care because of the limited spaces, she said.
In a news release, Lecce hailed the two Hamilton projects as being part of a record $1.3-billion investment in new schools across the province.
“Families deserve modern schools that are close to home, so it’s critically important that we build new schools and expansions faster, especially in rapidly growing communities,” he said.
The province has previously approved grants for just two of the board’s capital funding requests since 2018 — $13.5 million in 2019 for a new Binbrook elementary school and $16.7 million in 2021 for an elementary school near the Taro dump in upper Stoney Creek.
Neither has broken ground. The board is still waiting to buy the site for the Binbrook school, while trustees paused the upper Stoney Creek project last September amid public furor over the Taro dump’s foul odours.