Thank you, Mr. Chair. The roof at the William McDonald School has, in all honesty, been one of my major stresses for the last few months, ever since I heard there were issues with it. There were some issues put forward in 2016. We found that it had exceeded its life expectancy. They had done some patching. Over the time, though, the YK1 School Board Authority was told not to go on the roof, not by ECE or anyone else except by the contractor who fixed the original roof. They have not gone on the roof.
In the meantime, when they first got it fixed, there were a few little tree seedlings growing. Because no one went on the roof and pulled those seedlings out, they became trees on the roof. It meant that the trees became structural. Now, we are at a place where there are bags and there are buckets being held. There was mould found because of the constant dripping. It is an issue.
It was planned to replace the roof and the envelope of the school in the 2021 capital planning, but it is too late. We cannot leave children in a place where it is not safe at this time. This is now a health and safety issue, because the mould is actually not good for humans. We contained the mould. We will be fixing it in the spring break. It is going to keep going if we don't fix it.
The responsibility that ECE needs to take in this is that we never really had a firm policy in what our maintenance includes. We have learned from this lesson. Going forward in the new school year, we will be defining a policy that states maintenance includes things such as shovelling snow from the walkways, checking your roof, checking around the premises of the school to make sure that any health and safety issues are addressed. In that way, we do take responsibility, but this is a combination of efforts. I would love to be able to say it can wait to 2020-2021, but it cannot. This is now a health and safety issue that is important to children. Thank you, Mr. Chair.