The board chair of the Kamloops-Thompson School District says there’s still plenty of work to do before any plans on a new school in Sun Peaks are realized.
Kathleen Karpuk says the Ministry of Education would have to ask for a business case, similar to the process before funding was announced earlier this month to expand Valleyview Secondary.
“We only put a school for Sun Peaks on our capital list last year, in terms of trying to get funding for a school. Up until that point, we didn’t really have enough students in the community to be able to justify building a school.”
Karpuk says the school district is meeting with the municipality of Sun Peaks next week, on May 3, to talk about projections in student growth going forward.
“As we go into developing our capital request for June that we will be submitting to the Ministry, we’re talking to municipalities. Sun Peaks, the City of Kamloops, so that we can find out about growth projections in those municipalities and in different neighborhoods, so that we can then formulate a plan to go forward.”
Last year, the school district had a new Sun Peaks school as its fifth-highest priority for capital funding, with an estimated cost of nearly $16.5 million.