MEDICINE HAT, AB — A year after it closed its doors, Riverside School is now under new ownership.
Covenant Care announced Tuesday they had officially completed the purchase of Riverside School from SD76. The purchase closed at the end of May, says Truman Severson, president of Covenant Care and Covenant Living.
“We are now going to start a process of discerning the needs and opportunities in Medicine Hat, and see what the best use will be for the property,” he said over the phone from Edmonton.
Severson says the building will likely be a seniors’ residence or a long-term care facility, though nothing has been finalized.
Riverside School closed in 2017 after 101 years of operation. The building has mostly sat empty since it closed, but was used occasionally by the Medicine Hat Police Service for training purposes.
Severson says the school’s location in a residential neighbourhood made it an ideal spot for development.
“Quite often, the properties we are able to identify and pickup are kind of in the perimeter of cities, where they open up new subdivisions and there’s larger parcels of land for the type of housing and care facilities we do,” he said. “We know for lots of seniors, their traditional transportation routes are more in the core of a city, so it’s just a great piece of property in a great location in the middle of town, as opposed to the outskirts.”
There’s no timeline yet for when work will begin at Riverside School.
