Vision Nursing and Rest Home is expressing interest in redeveloping the former Sarnia Collegiate Institute & Technical School.
CEO Heather Martin says they've had a presence in south Sarnia for 42 years with a nursing home, retirement home and nurse practitioner clinic located at Wellington St., Brock and Crawford.
She says the high school's looming closure has made their board of directors apprehensive about having an abandoned or vacant school adjacent to the property.
"We've done a lot of outreach into the community to say, are there feasible projects that would work to make this property vibrant and keep the neighbourhood going again," says Martin.
She says transforming the 94-year-old building into a condominium development is one consideration.
"We are seeing that there are a lot of schools around the province closing and being repurposed into apartments, condominiums, housing units of all kinds of different way, shapes and form and alternatives and we're looking at all of them," says Martin.
She says at the end of the day, the board is simply trying to gather enough information to make an informed decision on whether or not to proceed to the next step, which would be working with the school board to acquire the site.
"We know that it's not going to be an inexpensive proposition," says Martin. "There's many things that a 100-year-old building has behind its walls that we would be yet to discover and those are all things that are after the next step."
Martin says they're committed to the south part of the city but it will take a lot of community partners to make a project of this magnitude successful.
"Be patient and hopefully things will pan out," says Martin. "There's no commitment. No guarantees."
