The Calgary Board of Education is closely monitoring aging school amenities and components, but are not inherently worried yet.
Despite increased emergency maintenance requests year-over-year in 2024-25, from 6,788 to 7,053, Calgary Board of Education (CBE) Superintendent Dany Breton said that aging infrastructure is not yet a systemic issue.
“Now, this isn’t an area of great concern at this time. We are able to continue to attend to the emergencies and the issues that arise,” he said during the June 9 CBE Board of Trustees meeting.
Breton said that if financially possible, the CBE would love to replace more parts of schools proactively instead of as they fail, but things breaking don’t necessarily follow a logical pattern.
“We could anticipate that gradually over time we will see more components failing because we’re not able to attend to all of the components that we would like to, but will it be this next school year? Maybe a 40-year-old boiler will continue working for one more year, but maybe next year it will fail,” he said.
“Maybe 10 other boilers that are also 40 years old will end up failing that same year; we just don’t know.”
As CBE’s infrastructure portfolio ages, the state of school facilities will continue to be monitored very closely, Breton said. Today, there isn’t an overarching trend that would indicate that something’s amiss in one area, according to the superintendent.
“We attend to the safety and security concerns that are raised within our schools as soon as they are brought to our attention,” he said.
“When a school is getting to that point where it needs a little bit more tender loving care, you end up seeing modernization requests or replacing school requests.”
At a previous board meeting, Breton estimated that changes in funding could result in a 20 per cent decrease in the ability to invest in the maintenance of schools.
Ultimately, he said, many of the additional calls can be chalked up to weather and are still within reason for a district as large and complex as the CBE.
“There may be elements that are brought to our attention more intensely in a certain year, because there might’ve been a significant weather event, a lot of rain, hail, whatever it might be that might ultimately create a lot more emergency work orders that suddenly need to be attended to,” he said.
