An elementary school under construction in Langford is drawing inspiration from another sort of structure — a tree house.
Going in that direction came out of the need to deal with the vertical focus of the building design at the Latoria Road construction site, said architect Lindsey Salter.
“The school is four storeys total, which is actually quite high for a school in that type of neighbourhood,” said Salter, who is working on the project with Surrey-based Thinkspace Architecture. “You see those types of schools in more urban areas, but it was a result of the site. “The site is very, very sloped and so we used the concept of stepping the building up.”
The stacking effect, with the school tucked into the forested area behind it and offering sweeping views, leads to the tree-house comparison.
“It sort of perches up high, and the bottom portion of the school uses muted materials that blend a bit more into the site,” Salter said.
The $39.6-million school will be about 45,000 square feet and accommodate 480 kindergarten-Grade 5 students in 20 classrooms. It is due to open in September 2025, and will feature a neighbourhood learning centre and child-care spaces.
A ceremony to announce the school’s Indigenous name will be held Monday. The district sought public suggestions for the name in January through an online platform and followed that with extensive consultation with First Nations.
Projections indicate that the school will be close to capacity right away, said Windy Beadall, the Sooke School District’s principal for capital planning.
“It’s in the Happy Valley area, which is growing quite a bit,” she said. “We’ve been sending a lot of students from Happy Valley to other schools, including PEXSISEN Elementary, which opened up last September.”
She said PEXSISEN has a 500-student capacity and is already at 400 “so it’s growing pretty quickly.”
“We’re just exploding all over the place.”
Overall growth in the district is among the fastest per capita among school districts in B.C. The student population has grown by about 2,000 since 2018, including 600 new students in September 2022 and a record increase of 800 in 2021, and is now over 12,000.
The district estimated in 2020 that it would grow by at least 300 students annually for the next 15 years.
The district’s capital plan includes two more elementary schools in the Bear Mountain and Royal Bay areas, while a location for a future secondary school has been secured on McCallum Road, near Costco.
“The Royal Bay area is definitely something that’s on our radar,” Beadall said. “We have to prioritize with the Ministry of Education which ones we’re going to go with first.”
Royal Bay Secondary, which opened in 2015, has undergone an expansion since then but still needs to bring in portables, she said.
Salter said Thinkspace has developed a specialty in designing schools, and in this case is intent on creating a building that reduces typical greenhouse-gas emissions by 70 per cent.
The use of mass-timber construction is a big part of that, she said, as is the use of heat pumps and solar power. Going in that direction is “embedded into the funding from the province,” Salter said.
Mass-timber techniques have thermal properties and reduce the need for insulation, she said, and can use locally sourced lumber.
“It’s literally pieces of 2x6 that have been laminated together.”
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