School's in
Alberta's innovative public-private partnerships to build 28 schools in Edmonton and Calgary saved taxpayers more than $200m and helped ease overcrowded classrooms
ALBERT A'S POPULATION SKYROCKETED during the 2000s. Fueled by growth in the oil and gas sector, the province added more than 600,000 new Albertans between 2000 and 2009, the most of any decade since 1960.
In Edmonton and Calgary, the province's two major cities, young families began moving into new subdivisions on the outskirts of the city. With them came the need for new infrastructure, including schools located closer to the cities' growth areas.
"There was a lot of pressure from metro [school] boards to get more schools in the suburbs," explains John Gibson, project manager at Alberta Infrastructure. And there was the need to do so quickly:
the traditional method of procuring schools, where a school board would get a grant from the province's Education Ministry and hire architects, consultants and contractors under several contracts over several years would simply not give Alberta its needed 18 schools fast enough.
"We estimate that had we given six schools to Edmonton public school board to build themselves, they would have taken at least four years to get the six built," Gibson says.
So in the mid-2000s, Alberta began considering the option of building the schools under a PPP. The resulting Alberta Schools Alternative Procurement, or ASAP, became Canada's largest PPP for education infrastructure, accommodating 12,000 students.