A place normally buzzing with the excitement of school winding down is instead buzzing with the sound of screw guns and miter saws. The property in and around Mitchell Elementary School is alive with machinery construction workers racing to finish what they can before students return in fall.

As Principal Joe Thiessen indicates, the initial plan to add five classrooms, a library, and a multi-purpose room onto the side of the building has been expanded upon. Now, they are renovating part of the preexisting school as well.

The centre of the building, where the library was, is being gutted to make room for what Thiessen calls a “learning suite,” a place where teachers specializing in literacy and numeracy will be grouped together. Old resource rooms will be merging into that suite and their former space will be used for new homerooms, among them, two full-size kindergarten rooms, making a total of three throughout the school.

The interior project may come to a surprise to some, as it was not budgeted for in the original plans, but the 4 million dollars and change from the provincial government ended up going further than anticipated. Thiessen stresses that the renovation is just as necessary as the addition.

“We have consistently been growing by between 15 and 20 students a year for the past 5 or 6 years and the province has really stepped up to meet that demand,” offers Thiessen. “It will be so awesome to have the space to adequately spread out.”

Jennifer Thomson teaches kindergarten at the school and says her classroom is one of several that is has been demolished to make way for the expansion.

Jennifer Thomson has been teaching small groups of kindergartners outside.

“When this all happened I was teaching from home and then all of a sudden I got this call to empty my classroom,” she says. “I’ve was doing most of my teaching through videos so I’ve been able to take videos while I was moving and so they got to see what that our whole classroom looked like packed in boxes and loaded into the gym. It’s been fun to show them all that as it is happening.”

Since the Hanover School Division began reopening their schools two weeks ago, Thomson says she has been meeting with small groups of students and their parents in the Mitchell park. Thomson will not be teaching in the park next fall though. All construction within the building is scheduled to be completed by August 28th, just before the beginning of the coming school year. Students however, will have to wait until January of 2021 before they can enjoy the addition.

Thiessen expects his grade 4 students will be given the lucky opportunity to be the first to use the new space.