Greenall High School in Balgonie, Saskatchewan is about to undergo its most significant overhaul in decades, adding a new gymnasium and cleaning up hazardous materials in a building that has served the fast-growing communities east of Regina since the 1970s. The catch: students won't be leaving while it happens.
The project calls for a 1,050 square meter addition housing a new gym and support spaces, alongside renovations touching roughly 6,500 square meters of the existing building. Before walls come down, crews will need to remediate hazardous materials present in the structure. Keeping the school occupied throughout means construction will have to proceed in carefully sequenced phases.
Greenall draws students from Balgonie, Pilot Butte, White City, and the surrounding rural area, a corridor that has seen some of Saskatchewan's fastest population growth as Regina's commuter belt expanded over the past two decades. That growth strained a building never designed for today's enrollment, making the expansion overdue according to Prairie Valley School Division, which has previously identified the school as a priority.
Source: NationGraph.
The decision to keep students in the building during construction is driven by practicality: there is no realistic alternative site to relocate hundreds of high schoolers, and portable classrooms at that scale are expensive. But phased construction alongside active hazmat abatement in an occupied school is a high-stakes operation. Similar projects elsewhere in Saskatchewan have drawn parent concern and, in some cases, protests when asbestos work proceeded near classrooms.
SaskBuilds, the province's centralized capital projects agency, is managing procurement. The project is listed on SaskTenders, with a formal RFP expected to go out in late June or early July 2026 and contractor submissions due in early August. Once a contractor is selected and work begins, the phasing plan will determine how much disruption students and staff face in any given term.
