New high school for Brantford-Brant on rushed timeline

With a ticking clock for the Catholic school board in Brantford-Brant to open a new high school in 2026, the City of Brantford is taking action to make sure the project is moving ahead.

The 17-acre site where the new school will be built needs planning changes before construction can start — an issue the city is expected to raise at a committee meeting this month.

The Brant Haldimand Norfolk Catholic District School Board was handed $45.7 million by the province in 2022 to add a third secondary school for Brantford. Serving students in both Brantford and the County of Brant, St. John’s College and Assumption College — the community’s only Catholic high schools — are facing enrollment pressure.

Assumption College was the most recent high school built in Brantford-Brant in 1992.

A new school on Powerline Road at the north end of Brantford — on land the county ceded to the city in 2017 when Brantford’s borders were expanded — will relieve some of the pressure, which the school board reported as an extra 590 students at Assumption this year above the school’s capacity of 1,032.

As the sale agreement for the future site on the north side of Powerline Road — between Park Road and Old Farm Road — still hasn’t been closed, the city is taking the next step of rezoning the lands to stay on an expedited timeline for construction .

At the moment, the site needs both an official plan and zoning bylaw amendment to authorize for the construction of a new high school. Those proposed changes are coming to a Sept. 14 planning committee meeting.

For the rezoning and plan changes, certain criteria will need to be met — which is something City of Brantford spokesperson Maria Visocchi said the city is already planning for. These considerations include direct access for cyclists and pedestrians, space for vehicles to pickup and drop-off students, and current or planned public transit within 250 meters of the future school.

At this time, Powerline Road is the only road servicing the proposed site, and sewer and water infrastructure will need to be put in place ahead of schedule.

“The need to design and construct a sanitary sewer and water main infrastructure to and within the secondary school site in a timely manner is the greatest challenge to achieving an expedited development timeline,” a city planning update in August stated.

The current zoning on the land is still the County of Brant’s agricultural zoning from before the boundary expansion by the City of Brantford. It will need to be rezoned as “major institutional.”

In an attempt to keep with the hope for shovels in the ground by June 2024, Visocchi said a decision with regards to rezoning is expected to be made by the planning committee on Sept. 14 and ratified by council at its next meeting on Sept. 26 .

“The development of new schools will be critical to ensuring that we have a local education system that has adequate physical resources to accommodate the growth that we are projecting in the city,” said Visocchi.

Members of the public are invited to attend the hybrid virtual and in-person planning committee meeting about the proposed site changes on Sept. 14 at 9 am

Celeste Percy-Beauregard is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter based at the Hamilton Spectator. The initiative is funded by the Government of Canada.