School portables should not be dumped at storage sites

This weekend I was in Didsbury helping move picnic tables, water tanks buildings, fences, flags and signs from one side of a quarter section to another to set up a park.  This park will be a beautiful place for an Arts Festival in just over a month.

When it came to the fence posts and wire, my wife and I would load them into the back of the truck, drive them to the destination, and unload them where they needed to be.  Then the fence was installed immediately.  Likewise with the picnic tables and water tanks, they were delivered to their destination.

What we didn’t do was load the picnic tables, unload them at a neighbour’s place for storage, reload them later in the month using a different truck, and deliver them later.  We got it all done at once.

Why on earth would we do that?  Unless we were watching the companies building school portables, we would never even consider that strategy.

Not even a half mile away from that park site we were setting up is an industrial park where at least 30 school portables are sitting.  They aren’t being built on that site, just stored.  In fact, they were built in a facility outside Crossfield.  That facility also has a large cache of school portables.  Stored.

Also, if you look in the back field of Notre Dame Collegiate in High River, it seems as though that is now a storage facility for school portables as well.  And at Senator Riley school in High River two portables remain unused, and have been unused and ready for transport for nearly 18 months.  Stored.

They are not attached to schools, who reopen to students for another school year in under four weeks.  By my simpleton calculations, in order for each of these portables to be delivered and installed in time, Alberta Education would have to install 5 portables each day with no weekends off.  Somehow, I doubt that, but anything is possible.

Meanwhile, school portables are being stored, and not always appropriately.  The company storing portables at the Didsbury site are not meeting their development permit obligations.  It looks like a dump.  And I can’t imagine Alberta Education wants empty school portables with wires, nails and other dangerous materials stored in the back field of an existing populated school, either.

ABOVE LEFT: The first lot outside of Didsbury jam packed with school portables.  They have so many stored there they needed another lot.
ABOVE RIGHT: The second lot outside of Didsbury.  Note the perfectly good truck for transporting portables that sits unloaded, the landscape feature that is supposed to provide a screen, and the missing 12-metre abuttment from the edge of the property.
UPDATE: As this blog was being written, portables were loaded onto a truck, moved to a different part of the property, and dropped there instead.

But here’s the kicker; according to WREM ICI Ltd., one of the companies building the modulars, those portables have to be stored until someone else picks them up (see page 10).  They have their own trucks to move the buildings around, but apparently those trucks are not good enough to actually deliver the portables to the schools themselves.  School boards are contracting other companies to deliver the buildings.

So even though the buildings are already on a truck, that truck will not be delivering the buildings to the schools.  Schools will remain crowded.  And when the school board can finally get the building delivered, students will already be in session, so the school site also becomes an active construction site.  From experience I can tell you that is not a wise idea, just considering the safety of the kids.

Almost a year ago it was reported that modulars were not being delivered as a result of delays in getting permits, but nobody was willing to accept the responsibility for it.

Well, it’s time for someone to take responsibility.  And now the responsibility falls to the Alberta NDP Government.  One great way to ensure Albertans are not concerned about how the NDP is spending money is to make sure we don’t when we don’t need to.  Offloading a school portable from one truck to another is one way to make sure we spend money when we don’t need to.  And for a party who suggests they value education to the extent they do, they sure are putting a few things at risk.

School portables should not be dumped at storage sites.  They should be installed, ready to house the future.