School Division applying for $3.5 million capital upgrade to McNaughton High School
March 3, 2025, 1:27 pm
Kara Kinna
South East Cornerstone School Division has applied to the Ministry of Education for $3.5 million in capital upgrades to McNaughton High School.
The application is one of two minor capital projects that the school division has put forth this year. The other is for upgrades at Estevan Comprehensive School. If approved, the upgrades at McNaughton High would include the addition of air conditioning in some parts of the school, electrical upgrades, fire suppression upgrades, upgrades to the library, roof repairs, and updates to create accessible washrooms.
“Every year the board gets to determine which schools will be forwarded to the ministry for a minor capital project,” says Keith Keating, the South East Cornserstone School Division Director of Education. “We can submit two minor capital projects per year. There are 28 school divisions we are competing against to get those upgrades in place.
“The last two years we’ve put in a similar application for McNaughton. This year we’ve got McNaughton and ECS that we’ve submitted for. We’ve really been focused on our larger schools that haven’t had a complete upgrade in a number of years. Those projects are anything in the $1 million to $10 million dollar range. We have been working with PMR (preventative maintenance and renewal) dollars to try and update our schools. The Home Ec lab at McNaughton last year is one example. We are trying to do bits and pieces across the school division in some of our schools, but we just don’t have the preventative maintenance renewal dollars to do large scale projects like that.”
Keating says there are only so many provincial dollars to go around and the ministry determines each year which projects are approved.
“I believe they set an amount every year in the provincial budget to determine how much they will spend on minor capital projects,” he says. “It would be similar to their major capital projects—they have some stipulations on the pieces that need to be put in place in order to be successful on a major capital project, but there are only so many dollars to go around so only so many of those get approved each year.
“We are looking at about a $3.5 million dollar upgrade for McNaughton School. That would allow us to address some of the piece around fire suppression and electrical systems, an upgrade to the library, air conditioning, roof replacements—we would replace a number of sections of the roof and there has been a little bit of work done on that already—and some washroom upgrades to improve accessibility.”
The upgrades would also include some air conditioning in hotter parts of the school.
“We would likely be going with DX air conditioning units. It’s too cost prohibitive to try and get all the ducting and stuff in for two storeys. We would likely focus on the second level and it would be rooftop systems,” says Andy Dobson, manager of facilities and transportation for South East Cornerstone School Division. “They would be individual air conditioning units on top of the building. It would be air conditioning for the building, but they would be slated for individual units on top of the roof. We would likely concentrate it on any computer labs and areas like that, and heat rises, so we would be concentrating on the second level.”
Keating says a community consultation held in early 2024 was helpful in establishing priorities for upgrades at the high school.
“When we had that community consultation, some of the plans we had in terms of upgrades and updates depended a great deal on a fire suppression system, and some of that fire suppression and those electrical upgrades would allow us to do other work in that school which we’re looking at—things like updates to the second Practical Applied Arts area. It would allow for some of those pieces to actually happen.
“We are looking at the library itself—currently it needs an update to the flooring, electrical, furniture, paint—and then there would be the air conditioning, and then the roof replacement of a number of different sections. That’s a piece that we’ve upgraded over the years on different schools, trying to stay up to date with the roof sections and this would really allow us to have that to be completely sealed. For the washroom updates and accessibility, we are finding across our school division those are pieces that have to be addressed especially with some of the new legislations around accessibility, in terms of making sure we have washrooms that are accessible to people with disabilities.”
Keating says the upgrades are important and he hopes the application is successful, as McNaughton has not had a significant upgrade for many years.
“Across the province there’s aging infrastructure in school buildings and hospitals and there has been a lot of money put into those, so we’re trying to focus on the places that haven’t had that provincial influx of dollars yet to be able to upgrade it to a place where the school will be good for a period of time,” he says. “So is it essential this gets done next year? I wouldn’t say it’s essential but I would say it’s very important in terms of maintenance of buildings across our school division and making sure we are addressing the needs that are in those individual schools so that it lasts for our kids well in the future.
“McNaughton itself hasn’t had an upgrade in quite a period of time other than the individual pieces we do through our preventative maintenance and renewal, like the roof pieces we’ve been able to do and the upgrades to the Home Ec lab. There are preventative maintenance and renewal dollars that come from the provincial government in our budget each year, and that allows us to do some small upgrades to schools over time, but a larger upgrade like this really depends on those provincial dollars.
“From 2013 to 2023 there was about a million dollars spent on McNaughton for some of those smaller upgrades that we have managed to do. It’s been a long time since there’s been a lot of provincial dollars put into McNaughton school.
“The application is for the 2026-27 school year and they would announce it at provincial budget time wether or not that applications been approved.”
Dobson and Keating say the upgrades would extend the life of McNaughton school by about 10-15 years.
“Right now the building is structurally sound and the school is in pretty reasonable shape in terms of what you look at across the province, but it hasn’t had a complete upgrade in a lot of years so I think this would extend the lifetime of that school by a pretty reasonable amount—I’m guessing for at least a couple of decades it would extend the life of that school,” says Keating.
