'Absolutely good news.' School boards to benefit from cap and trade money

School boards across Ontario will receive $1.4 billion on school renewal and repairs this year, including $200 million of cap and trade proceeds from the government’s new Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF).

The Algoma District School Board (ADSB) will receive $2.2 million, while the Huron-Superior Catholic District School Board (H-SCDSB) will be awarded $579,000 to install new, energy-efficient windows, lights and furnaces in some of their schools.  

“It’s absolutely good news, not only for us but every school board in the province of Ontario, to refresh some schools and put in some things that will benefit from an energy perspective and help us out with future costs,” said Joe Santa Maria, ADSB superintendent of business.

“For 2017-2018, we’re getting $8.8 million in school condition improvement funding as well as approximately $3 million in school renewal money, so that $2.2 million adds to that $11.8 million we’re going to get, so it’s really going to allow us to do some good things in the schools.”      

The ADSB is not certain, at this point, at which of its schools the extra cash will be spent for energy-efficient improvements.

“We received this letter Apr. 12, so we haven’t sat down as a team yet with our plant department to go through the full list of what we want to do with the funds, so we’re going to go through that process in the near future, probably after June.”

Santa Maria said the ADSB would announce, probably in October or November, energy-efficient projects to work on in summer 2018.

“We want to do it right, put it in the right spots, (we want) things like improvements to lighting…we’ve been on a very good movement over the last 10 years where we’ve done a lot of this through our capital funding which we receive.”

“This funding adds to the ability to do it a lot sooner, things like lighting, HVAC, windows, we’re doing these every year.”

Santa Maria said the board strives to ensure school renewal funding is spread out evenly between schools in the Sault and the outlying, rural schools in the Algoma region.

“I would say the schools in the rural settings are probably some of the nicest schools in the whole ADSB system…Hornepayne is a new build and Chapleau has a brand new, renovated JK to 12 school.”

“You can look at it (the extra funding) as a bonus,” said Sam Colizza, H-SCDSB manager of plant services.

“We’re going to designate the funding to be spent at two schools in our north district, at St. Basil’s in White River and St. Joseph French Immersion in Wawa…we were planning these two projects, so now we can go forward with them,” Colizza said.

“In both locations we’re replacing the boilers and associated pumps and piping, and in White River we’re replacing an air-handling unit.”

Colizza said the two schools will also be transformed from using fuel oil to propane.

Across the board system, Colizza said the H-SCDSB hopes to save 15 to 20 per cent on fuel consumption costs, depending on weather conditions.