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The region’s largest school board has snapped up a $10.45-million property in southwest London with plans to build a new elementary school.
The land was purchased by the Thames Valley District school board through the Ministry of Education’s land priorities fund, which provides cash for local officials to buy property for future projects – thus allowing boards to have shovel-ready plans when they get funding to actually build, a new Queen’s Park requirement.
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But a new school has not officially been announced, school board spokesperson Kyle Rea noted in an email to The Free Press.
“While the land is earmarked as a site for a future school, at this time the Ministry of Education has not approved or provided funds for construction of a new school,” he said. “Any changes to the status of this land will be publicly shared at the appropriate time.”
The land was purchased on Dec. 12 from Sifton Properties and is located at Knott Drive, Stewart Avenue and Roy McDonald Drive, just north of Exeter Road. That’s an area that was once a sparsely population southern edge of London, but has become built up in recent years.
The land purchase is just one of several new schools projected by the London-area board across Middlesex, Oxford, and Elgin counties and London, says Ben Puzanov, the school board’s director of planning.
Puzanov has said the board’s biggest challenge is “making sure we have access to provincial capital monies to keep building schools.”
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Both the Thames Valley and the London Catholic school boards have been racing to build new schools amid projections that show London and surrounding Middlesex County will add the equivalent to a city the size of Windsor in population growth during the next 25 years.
The board currently has seven new schools in the works, while an expansion at Eagle Heights elementary school, located along Oxford Street West, is complete.
Northwest public school and White Pine public school, the new elementary schools for northwest and southwest London, are expected to open this September.
Four new elementary schools in Belmont, Lucan, southeast London, and west London are expected to open for the 2026-27 school year. A north Woodstock elementary school named Turtle Island is under construction and expected to open for the winter of 2026.
Beyond that, Puzaanov said, the board will need eight new schools, including one high school, and four additions over the next five to seven years to accommodate all the new families they expect will be coming to the region.
In Elgin County there is currently one elementary school in the design phase that has been approved to go to tender. Two new schools, including a high school, are in the planning phase but the need will increase substantially due to the opening of the new Volkswagen electric-vehicle battery plant in St. Thomas in 2027.
A new school is needed in both Thamesford and Ingersoll, as well as two expansions in existing schools.
London District Catholic school board spokesperson Mark Adkinson said they’re unable to comment about new schools until the spring, because they have a number of projects they “can’t speak about publicly at this time.”
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