The investment will support the creation of 682 new student spaces and 176 licensed child care spaces in Hamilton. Pictured: Education Minister Stephen Lecce at the Waterdown announcement. Photo Credit: Donna Skelly/X.
The Ontario government recently announced $31.2 million in funding for the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), Hamilton’s public board, to build a new elementary school in Waterdown and expand an elementary school in Mount Hope.
The investment will support the creation of 682 new student spaces and 176 licensed child care spaces in Hamilton.
The funding is broken down into $22.1 million for a new facility called Waterdown Bay Elementary School and $9.1 million for an addition to Mount Hope Elementary School.
The new Waterdown school will be built in the Mountainview Heights neighbourhood at Skinner Road and Great Falls Boulevard which is near the Dundas Street East and Mallard Trail intersection.
The new Waterdown school will create 504 new student spaces for children in kindergarten to Grade 8 and a new 88-space child care centre with two preschool rooms, two toddler rooms, and an infant room.
Meanwhile, the addition and renovations at Mount Hope Elementary School will add an additional 178 student spaces with six new classrooms and upgrades to existing spaces.
The Mount Hope project will also include the addition of an 88-space child care centre mirroring the Waterdown centre with two preschool rooms, two toddler rooms, and an infant room.
Mount Hope Elementary will remain open during construction as interior renovations will take place over the summer months.
Both projects are expected to be complete during the 2027-2028 school year.
The funding announcement was made by Flamborough-Glanbrook Member of Provincial Parliament (MPP) Donna Skelly and Education Minister Stephen Lecce.
Both the new school and the Mount Hope school are located within Skelly’s constituency.
Skelly says that Flamborough-Glanbrook “is one of the fastest growing communities in Ontario.”
Echoing Skelly, a HWDSB press release states, “These investments will ensure that HWDSB can continue to fairly distribute capacity across Hamilton, and ensure that students and families in the rapidly growing communities of Waterdown and Mount Hope have access to modern, spacious, and state-of-the-art learning environments.”
The two projects are part of a $1.3 billion investment by the Ontario government to build new schools and expand existing schools.
The investment is the highest ever made in a single year and supports 60 projects, including 39 new school builds and 21 expansions to existing schools.
Of those projects, 27 also include the creation of child care spaces.
Overall, the funding will mean more than 27,000 new student spaces and 1,700 licensed child care spaces across Ontario.
The project is also part of the Ministry of Education’s plan, announced in December 2023, to build schools faster through a more streamlined process that promotes standardizing designs, prioritizing shovel-ready projects, and effectively using space.
“In Ontario, the average school construction timeline is four to seven years, which comes from an obsolete capital process that has not been meaningfully overhauled since 2010-2011,” reads a December 11, 2023, press release from the Ontario government.
The Ontario government says that the new measures they introduced in December “will cut construction timelines by nearly 50 per cent to meet the unprecedented pace of growth across the province.”
Based in Hamilton, he reaches hundreds of thousands of people monthly on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter. He has been published in The Hamilton Spectator, Stoney Creek News, and Bay Observer. He has also been a segment host with Cable 14 Hamilton. In 2017, he received the Chancellor Full Tuition Scholarship from the University of Ottawa (BA, 2022). He has also received the Governor General’s Academic Medal. He formerly worked in a non-partisan role on Parliament Hill in Ottawa.
