Chimney Creek Elementary to be demolished

17 years after it has closed, an elementary school that is currently being used for storage by School District 27 and the Williams Lake Dry Grad Committee will be torn down.

Manager of Facilities and Transportation, Alex Telford says the Chimney Creek Elementary School will be demolished by March 31, 2020.

“It had a capacity of about 75 students, and it was closed in 2002 so it sat with no heat or anything since 2002,” Telford says. “We’ve been using it for District storage, meaning desks and chairs, and surplus cabinetry.”

Telford says the District will be flagging what items they want to take out for the District on Wednesday (Nov. 27) and for the most part, they have migrated most of it to Glendale.

The Williams Lake Dry Grad Committee is also working to move their vast collection of decorations from the school into two storage units that the City of Williams Lake recently approved to be stored behind the maintenance building at the Williams Lake Regional Airport for a 2-year term.

Chimney Creek Elementary School was constructed in 1976 with an addition in 1980.

The Province said in a letter dated Nov. 6 it would be providing the School District up to a maximum of $175,000 in Ministry of Education capital funding to demolish the school.

“The school is actually owned by the Crown. It’s called the Crown Capital Grant, so they gave us the property years ago to use as a school site and it’s a requirement if we’re going to give it back to them that we have to remove any improvements that are on the site,” Telford says.

“Going forward with this we applied in our five-year capital plan last spring to demolish that site and it met all of the criteria. This is a brand new program the Ministry is offering for small districts like us to be able to get rid of the liability issues around having closed buildings that are starting to leak and have break-in issues and that type of thing, so we didn’t have to use District funds to liquidate it.”