REGINA - It’s taken a while, but a site has finally been found for the new West Harbour Landing joint-use school.
At an announcement Thursday at the existing joint-use school in the Harbour Landing neighbourhood, Education Minister Dustin Duncan confirmed that eleven acres at the corner of Gordon Road and Campbell Street in south Regina have been selected as the site for the new school.
This will be the second school for the Harbour Landing neighbourhood. It will be a joint-use elementary school used by both the public and the Catholic school divisions. It is expected to be open by 2026 and accommodate around 850 students. It will also have a 90-space child care centre, and a community space with a kitchen area.
A Memorandum of Understanding has been co-signed by the Ministry of Education, City of Regina, Regina Public School Division, and Regina Catholic School Division. According to the MOU the City of Regina will be responsible for acquiring the land, while the costs for servicing the land are to be shared between the province and the city. The province states that both the province and school boards are working to determine servicing requirements, in consultation with the City of Regina.
The announcement is one that is long awaited in the fast-growing Harbour Landing community, a new subdivision developed in the southwest corner of Regina north of Highway 1 and south of the airport.
The neighbourhood has seen some of the fastest growth in population in the province with a large influx of young families with kids, resulting in the need for a new school for the area.
But the new school has seen one delay after another. The province had put funding in place for a new school back in 2020 to address the needs, but it has been a struggle securing land for the school with numerous delays in nailing down a suitable site.
In the meantime, the population of the area continued to grow beyond expectations. Enrolment has ballooned at Harbour Landing School creating serious overcrowding issues, with the number of students exceeding 1,000.
To address the overcrowding, recently the public school division announced a temporary boundary change would take effect with 200 students being transferred to Ethel Milliken School starting this fall.
"The Regina Public School Division, the administration had to make some pretty difficult decisions in changing our boundaries," said Regina Board of Education Chair Tara Molson. "Over the last few weeks, we held community consultations, taking ideas from families on how we will be able to accommodate what their needs will be, what childcare situations look like, and how they’ll be impacted by boundary changes . That’s something we’re essentially forced to do to accommodate education outcomes. In order to achieve those we need proper classroom sizes which means moving boundaries so that we can kind of even out enrolment across a few schools.”
She anticipates when the new school opens in 2026, it will be full.
It has been a difficult process for students at Harbour Landing School as well as the adjoining St. Kateri Tekakwitha School. St. Kateri is also dealing with capacity issues but so far has avoided having to make boundary changes.
“The last few years have not been easy on any of our staff, any of our community, and any of our students, and that challenge isn’t over today,” said Regina Catholic School Division Board Chair Shauna Weninger, speaking to the audience including several Harbour Landing elementary students at the announcement.
“You guys are going to continue to work that path, and carry that journey over the next couple of years while we build the school. And it is great that we have the light at the end of the tunnel, but it is not to the diminish the journey we’ve all been on together and have brought us along on.”
Education Minister Duncan praised the work of all the partners involved in trying to find a solution.
“Regina Public, Regina Catholic, they identified early on in the school year at Harbour Landing and St. Kateri (Tekakwitha) that it was a challenge with enrolment, that certainly Harbour Landing area was growing, I think, beyond what anyone really expected certainly this quickly in the history of Harbour Landing.”
He acknowledged finding the location in Harbour Location was going be a challenge from the outset.
“Just the availability of land was going to be a challenge. You go north, you’re at the airport, you go east and you’re at the other side of Lewvan (Drive), you go south and it’s the No. 1 highway. And so really there’s only one direction to go. And so we worked really closely with the City to get us to the point where the MOU is now signed and we can move forward on building those schools.”
Mayor Masters also pointed to the population growth in Harbour Landing going beyond what their own planners had anticipated. The city consequently did not have municipal reserve land in place to turn over for a second joint-use school in the neighbourhood.
“I’m not sure from a planning perspective that we were right on the mark in terms of determining or predicting how many kids would be here,” said Masters.
“There were a bunch of moving parts I think over the last 10 years, which resulted in this sort of storm of circumstances where we didn’t have the land, the school filled up very quickly based on the density of the neighbourhood out here,” said Mayor Masters to reporters. “So we secured the land in partnership with the two school boards and the province to make sure our contribution was in place out of our municipal reserve.”
Mayor Masters also said the design of this joint-use school required a certain acreage, which wasn’t considered in 2009 when the neighbourhood was approved. To avoid this situation happening in the future, Masters suggested that they go right to the school boards with the concept plans and say “this is how many homes were going to have, how much space is going to be required… we play a critical role in terms of ensuring the school board can deliver to kids where they’re at.”
