Jason Unrau
Northern News Services

(Sep 23/05) - For those Samuel Hearne secondary school students attending classes at the recreation centre, their learning environment went from drapes to drywall, Monday, as temporary arena digs evolved into more permanent classrooms in the curling rink.

"All things considered, it's going fairly well," said Beaufort Delta Education Council Superintendent Dennis Parsons. "If there's a silver lining in all this, it's that people in the community have pulled together to get the kids back in school."

At Twin Lakes MLA Floyd Roland's constituency meeting last Thursday, the public works minister was sticking to his pledge to solve the SHSS structural problems by December.

"The timing remains intact," he said, adding that further foundation work would continue through the summer to hopefully keep SHSS operational until 2011, when a new secondary school is expected to be completed.

"If that can't happen, we'd be looking at altering our capital plan," he said.

While the common complaint among students at the recreation centre is noise, Parsons says several other issues also have yet to be fully addressed.

These include spreading custodial services between the three different classroom locations (rec centre, SAMS and the college) and setting up a proper administration network, which has prevented staff from keeping simple attendance records.

SHSS principal Dave Reid says he won't have attendance numbers until the school's computer system is back up and running next week.

As well, since the Workers Compensation Board issued a ban on entry to the school building as of Sept. 4, Parsons says he's working on getting the teachers access so they can retrieve some of the supplies necessary for certain courses, like science, for example.