Nearly one year later, residents still asking province for Hazel Trembath update 

Before the fire, Shawna Comey walked four blocks every morning from her Port Coquitlam home to pick up and drop off her two children from school. 

Some days, as executive of the Hazel Trembath Elementary School PAC, Comey would linger around the halls — check the school’s mailbox, do some photocopying or walk one of her kids home if they were sick. 

Her commute to the Winslow Centre in Coquitlam — the temporary school for her children — now takes anywhere between 25 and 40 minutes, following a fire that burned Port Coquitlam’s Hazel Trembath Elementary School to the ground last fall. 

“I was in my school community,” Comey said before the Oct. 14, 2023 fire that was deemed suspicious. “We don’t get those every day face-to-face connections with the school staff and community. There’s a disconnect I feel.” 

That lack of community was the catalyst behind dozens of students, staff and residents coming together to mark the first day of classes earlier this week at an empty gravel lot on the site where Hazel Trembath Elementary School once stood for roughly five decades. 

For almost one year, students between the ages of four and 11 have taken the bus 20 minutes one-way to the Winslow Centre. 

The bus met students on a nearby street while fencing guarded the site of the former school. But as of this week, it’s scheduled to meet students at the parking lot of Hazel Trembath, as the protective fencing has been down since June. 

Students were given a tour of where the bus will be picking them up for the foreseeable future on Tuesday morning. 

The event, which was also organized to pressure the province to come up with a plan to rebuild Hazel Trembath, comes as the community has been grappling with an eerie summer since this fencing was removed.

Although some students have seemingly been unfazed by the relocation to Coquitlam, Comey says it has been hard for others seeing the site daily. 

“It’s been weird walking on the site of where your kids school once was,” she said. “There have been students drawing lines [on the ground] being, ‘This is where my classroom used to be. This is where the gym was.’” 

School District 43 sent the Ministry of Education a business plan regarding the future of the school in June.

The proposal outlined three options: a traditional rebuild that would take between three and five years, a modular prefab design that would cut that wait in half, or not rebuild at all and send students into other schools in the community. 

Comey says that students and families have been left in limbo for the last two months, waiting for the province to respond to one of those potential solutions. 

In June, Rachna Singh, B.C.’s minister of education and child care, said in a statement to Global News that the province is committed to rebuilding Hazel Trembath, and would share more information as planning progresses with the school district. 

The modular prefab design — a process where a building is primarily constructed off-site and then transported to its new location — is Comey’s preferred option, as it would get the more than 200 students back to school the quickest.

“My daughter is starting Grade 3, so hopefully, she could start her Grade 5 year back in Port Coquitlam,” said Comey, who added her son is entering his last year of elementary school and will never be able to attend the new Hazel Trembath, if it’s rebuilt. 

She’s grateful that both of her children have the chance to attend a temporary school in a neighbouring city, but the facility lacks the amenities — playgrounds and music classes ­— that other students have in other schools. 

The instructional time is also shorter at the temporary location in Coquitlam. 

“Although they have a school to go to, a temporary school, they are still not getting everything that these students need and deserve,” Comey said. 

The school’s PAC is expected to continue pressuring the province into the fall, hoping to get an answer on the future of the school before the provincial election on Oct. 19. 

“We want to know is Hazel going to be rebuilt? If not, what’s going to happen with our kids?” Comey said. 

“We don’t want to fall between the cracks and be forgotten about.”