The Government of Saskatchewan recently announced that they will be spending $11 million on school supports across the province, $6 million of which will fund 15 relocatable classrooms in seven school divisions.

Two of those school divisions are the Chinook School Division and Holy Trinity Catholic School Division.

The schools receiving the funding are École Centennial School and All Saints Catholic School, which share a joint facility in Swift Current.

All Saints will be receiving funding for three of the classrooms.

The program seeks to address school population concerns, which Sean Chase, the director of education for the Holy Trinity Catholic School Division, said were present in All Saints School.

"In our business case [for the application of the resource] we submitted our numbers which are currently at 125 per cent capacity at our school, All Saints Catholic in Swift Current."

That application came a month ahead of time from the provincial budget, which Chase said he was thankful for.

"That gives us an extra four weeks of planning because work needs to go into an exploration of how we're going to realize these classrooms, whether we order some relocatable classrooms or we look into a potential solution of just an additional building of space onto there."

"All that extra time really helps us with the goal of being able to accommodate and have a solution in place for September of 2020."

Chase said that they were in talks with the Chinook School Division to help spread the new classroom resource for the benefit of both organizations.

Preparing for the event that they did not receive the classrooms, Holy Trinity School Division was looking for a plan to help deal with overflow of students.

"We've already used a couple of the ancillary break-out spaces in the school," Chase stated," to serve as classrooms with our current capacity issues."

"We were certainly exploring that possibility if we didn't receive this good news of some additional capacity through the way of relocatables, of what next year might look like."

He added that the relocatable will meet their current and future needs, although time will tell how far into the future.

While unsure of future student population growth, the division was confident that the funding would provide expansion room for at least the next few years.

The extra space will be directly joined to the facility. Chase said that they had had conversations with the City of Swift Current to leave space in the area for a possible integrated leisure facility to be erected.

Swift Current MLA Everett Hindley said that he was aware of the school population problem, and was happy to see the announcement come through.

"It's an interesting situation, those schools are new to our community as of not too many years ago, and just given a growing province and a growing population here, there was some pressures in terms of classes there and in terms of the number of students there."

The Ministry of Education states that the costs for each of the expansions will vary on a case-by-case basis, and that school divisions will tender the relocatable classrooms in the weeks ahead.