It looks as though the Hanna Primary School building will be demolished in the very near future.
Prairie Land Regional School Division has completed an extensive renovation at J.C. Charyk Hanna School and after the Christmas break, K-6 students in the community will have a new home.
Sandra Beaudoin, of the Hanna Round House Society was hoping to preserve the former school and made a presentation to the School Board.
“What we were proposing if PLRD would give the school and the property to us, we would look after the property, and that building could be converted into a trades training centre,” she said.
She explains the Round House Society has had its designation as a historical society since January of 2010, and has a lot of things that need to be built to maintain and restore its property. She says they were in talks with other educational institutions to introduce trade programs, such as historical carpentry and joinery to the high school, and the former Primary School could be used a training site for students who would be interested in these trades.
“The whole idea was to get trades training in our J.C. Charyk School in order for the kids to do that on an existing building,” she said.
PLRD has been successful in bringing post-secondary training into the school. In fact, her son graduated, with his power engineering ticket.
“Our hope was to provide another option for other kids to benefit who may not be interested in something like engineering, but something like the trades.
She could see the project benefiting education as well as tourism and economic development.
“We are going lose our coal mine eventually and supposedly the government was going to be giving money to communities in order to bring in industry to those areas that are going to be losing their coal mines, it seems like to could be a decent building to utilize to do that,” said Beaudoin.
In the end, the board brought forth a motion to turn over the school to the society, but it was defeated.
“Given a short period of time, it is really hard to get everything in place,” she said. “They were very generous to allow me to present the proposal to them. They were trying to help make it work.”
In the end, she said the town felt it would be too much risk, and were not willing to take on the property if the idea failed, leaving it in the hands of PLRD to eventually demolish.
