Golden Hills School Division passed a major milestone in realizing its goal for a new Wheatland East School. 
On August 29, Wheatland County held a public meeting into the re-designation of a parcel of land selected to be a new regional school in the area to serve surrounding communities.
In the end, Wheatland Council voted almost unanimously in favour to re-designate the land on second reading.
“That means we're into subdivision now,” said Golden Hills Superintendent Bevan Daverne.
“The public hearing was obviously a significant and major step forward. We still have work to do with subdivision, but certainly the re-designation hearing was a big a step in the right direction.”
This is not the first time Golden Hills has requested Wheatland County re-designate a site for a school in the eastern part of the county.
“There certainly were some differences between this hearing and the one we had almost three years ago. There are an awful lot of parents who have come out in support of the new consolidated school. That was pretty clear in the public hearing,” said Daverne. “I think parents have had enough time to work through the information, look at options.”
The school division has been working on a solution to the schooling situation in this part of Wheatland for a number of years. Through 2012 the division made a concerted effort to collect as much information on the wants, needs and opinions of families in the area, and what options could serve the students best.
“We have taken a ton of time, we went through a whole bunch of pre-work in a whole bunch of areas to make sure we were able to answer questions and able to do a good job providing people with the information they needed in order to make a decision, if this was something they wanted to support,” said Daverne.
With the re-designation complete, the division and communities are ready to move on to the next step.
“The message we heard from parents is we really need to get going on this and the county’s support was music to their ears,” he said. “It was what we wanted to hear, now we are in a school design process and a subdivision process and we’re anxious to get going ahead."