DRAYTON – The province is investing $17.3 million dollars to build a new catholic elementary school in Drayton.
Perth-Wellington MPP Matthew Rae and Education Minister Stephen Lecce announced the funding Friday in town.
“The former government, the Liberals, closed 600 schools, they used to take six to 10 years to build them,” said Lecce. “Here we are in the rural community of Mapleton announcing that we are going to be building a new, brand new elementary school — a $17 million investment.”
The school will serve children in both the Township of Mapleton and the Town of Minto. It will include a childcare centre with 64 spaces and the elementary school will include 222 spaces for children from kindergarten to grade eight.
“I’m so excited about the childcare part,” said Mapleton Mayor Gregg Davidson. “We’ve been working really hard to get that here for a number of years and we partnered with the catholic school board a few years ago and started doing delegations with the ministry saying ‘look we have this whole partnership going on and we need to have this in our community.’ And the first answer we got was no, but we were persistent and wow, look at where we are today by being persistent.”
Rae got a lot of the credit for making the project a reality.
“When Mayor Davidson mentioned he called me relatively after I was elected two years ago, that’s basically when I started taking up the file,” said Rae. “I was appointed parliamentary assistant to Minister Lecce which did help in that because I understood how the internal process works on the Ministry of Education side.”
The new school is to be located at the end of Bonnywood Drive in Drayton. It is expected to open in September of 2026.
