Mike W. Bryant
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Aug 25/00) - Construction crews are heading into the home stretch in completing the new Weledeh Catholic school.

Despite a rolling domino effect of delays that hampered the completion of the school, Yellowknife Catholic Schools (YCS) is confident the facility will be ready when it opens it doors to students three days from now.

"Really, what the whole issue is, was the three weeks before Christmas last year we lost when the ferry outage happened," said YCS superintendent, Kern Von Hagen. "It threw us off and we never really seemed to recover."

Construction of the school began 13 months ago. According to Von Hagen, the final tally on the cost of building is expected to total $10.2 million. Most of those dollars will come from the territorial government in $860,000 instalments paid out over 20 years.

The pride of the school will be its gymnasium. Almost 1,600 square meters in size, it will be the largest indoor space North of 60, said Von Hagen.

"The music/drama space and the gym will be the last spaces ready.

"The gym will take the longest, it will probably be ready in mid-September."

Von Hagen expects the gymnasium to play an important role in the community for recreational and civic events, such as trade shows and the Youth against Drunk Drivers awareness campaign next March.

Staying in step with the current trend in Yellowknife for using natural sunlight to brighten rooms and hallways, the architects have designed the building with a multitude of windows and skylights.

"There's a lot of glass," said architect Simon Taylor, who works for Pin-Matthews Architects.

"It's a very open concept building."

"I think the big draw is that it completes the St. Pat's (school) project, so it's now going to be like a campus."

Even though the school will primarily be used by elementary school-aged children, four classrooms will left aside for students from St. Patrick high school next door. In all, there will be room at the school for up to 375 students.

Weledeh Catholic school will be officially commissioned Nov. 20-22.