North West College’s Battlefords Campus has expanded, launching a new location for classrooms at the Frontier Centre Mall in North Battleford.
The college held an opening ceremony at the site, located at the north end of the mall, Monday evening.
Eli Ahlquist, North West College president and CEO, said he is excited to see the project now complete for the new site, called The Frontier Mall Learning Centre.
“We’re celebrating the opening and actual operation of the space here,” he said. “It’s great to be able to show it off to the community, to let people know what’s been happening in the mall, and how wonderful the learning environment is here that we have.”
The project involved renovating about 5,000 sq. feet of space that is being leased from the mall’s owners, Terracap Property Management, to create five classrooms and what’s called a flex room for multi-purposes, such as skilled trades programming.
The estimated cost of the renovation project that has been about a year in the works is about $375,000, including some support from the province for operational costs.
The learning centre will be used by all North West College students as another site outside the North Battleford campus location.
Ahlquist noted enrolment has been increasing, so this new space will help fill a need. It’s currently being used for day programming since it opened on January 2.
“We’ve definitely seen a lot of growth this year,” he said. “We needed some new space and some modern space. It’s great to have these updated rooms, and it will be a good learning experience for our students… This provides us with a bit of flexibility and some additional space to stretch out a bit… We’re really pleased with the outcome.”
Ahlquist said some significant changes had to be done to the space that was previously used as a warehouse, to renovate it to a learning environment.
North Battleford Mayor David Gillan was thrilled to see the college’s new expanded space.
“It will give our young people more opportunities to get more education, because [the site] opens more seats, it opens more opportunities,” he said.
The college’s board of governors’ chair George Prudat explained the college essentially “outgrew its footprint” in the existing campus.
“There’s a lot of demand for education in the community,” he said. “That’s why we had to expand to this place.”
Prudat added the new site is expected to be only interim because the college is hoping in the province’s March budget to have funding for a new proposed campus in the Battlefords.
“That’s what we’ve been trying to get,” he said. “We’re looking at this as an interim space until we can get into the new college, which will be a few years down the road.”
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angela.brown@pattisonmedia.com
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