Two years after fire took their school, 237 Waterhen Lake students have classrooms of their own again

In May 2024, fire destroyed the kindergarten-to-Grade 12 school at Waterhen Lake First Nation in north-west Saskatchewan. This month, Chief Blaine Fiddler and Indigenous Services Minister Mandy Gull-Masty opened its replacement: a $15 million Canadian (about $10.7 million) temporary school built from 17 ready-to-move units holding classrooms, a Head Start programme and a daycare, serving about 237 students. It is explicitly a bridge, not the destination — planning and design for a permanent school on a new site are already under way. As the community put it at the opening: the facility may be temporary, but the commitment to education is permanent.

SDG 4 · Quality education — Mechanism: infrastructure build