OLDS — Community Learning Campus (CLC) recreational facilities such as the fitness centre, gym and TransCanada Theatre, are in a holding pattern while Chinook’s Edge School Division and Olds College officials figure out how to reopen them all.
However, it’s expected that the fitness centre will be the first facility to reopen because it has a steady client base throughout the summer, while summer is the low season for the gym and theatre, according to CLC director Jackie Taylor.
The CLC is a partnership between Olds College and the Chinook’s Edge School Division. Both the college and high school share the facilities contained therein.
“We’re still working through the stage of just looking at the Alberta Health Services guidelines,” Taylor said during an interview.
“We’re right now doing facility assessments, making sure we have different engineering controls in place.
“We’re just doing right now that heavy lifting that helps to inform us as to when we can be ready so we that we can then make sure we can publish dates at that point in time.”
Staffing is another factor.
“Our fitness centre staff, they’re not actually working right now,” she said. “It’s a matter of following all of the needed HR (Human Resources) guidelines – both around caretaking and your service staff and your fitness centre staff, so there’s all those, as well as physically getting the facilities ready.
“Right now we’re in low season anyways, so we typically don’t have many external bookings through the low season and we don’t actually have the staff in place right now.
“So right now we’re very much focused on the fitness centre because we know we have a really active client base who is hopeful that we’ll have a date in the near future.”
Taylor said earlier this month, CLC officials were unsure whether gyms and fitness centres would be able to open in stage 2 or 3 of the province’s reopening plan so that held them back a bit too.
Taylor said the next significant piece of information that will help the CLC make plans for reopening is when school reopens.
“That will allow us to cue up. There’s so much work involved in each of those pieces of the puzzle, getting back into action safely, that we kind of have to cue up what we focus on at each given time,” she said.
So the fact that this is the really low season for theatre and gym bookings is kind of handy.
“The gymnasium is actually very typically very quiet over the summer. Really at the end of the day it’s mostly used by some of the Olds College athletics,” she said.
“But right now students aren’t on campus and won’t be in any capacity, even through to the fall, so you know, those pieces of the puzzle aren’t on our work (schedule) right now because they’re not normally busy locations at this time of the year.
“So we’re just letting them stay quiet while we really work right now on what can happen with the fitness centre and look at that as kind of our first step.”
