Carbonear’s Keyin campus moving up the bay

By Chris Lewis | April 29, 2021

Keyin College’s CBN campus in Carbonear is gearing up for a move to Bay Roberts.

President Craig Tucker said the Carbonear campus was a franchise, recently purchased back from franchise owner Margaret Drover.

Tucker said Keyin is in the process of building a brand new, “state of the art” campus at Beaver Plaza in Bay Roberts.

“Carbonear has changed in demographics over the years,” Tucker explained. “As we bought it, we did a market analysis on it. We looked at where the hub was out there and said, well, we’re better off shooting from Carbonear to Bay Roberts.”

He said after looking into the growth in Bay Roberts, it felt like the wisest decision for the school to make.

Tucker did not have a concrete timeline for the move, but he hopes to see the shift by September.

“We’re teaching a lot of our curriculum these days in a virtual sense,” Tucker said. “Our longer arc is basically that we want to be in for September … At the absolute latest, it would be in January. But we’ll hopefully be there before then in terms of having administration in and set up, and so forth. We’re just getting started on approvals and our renovation project as we speak. Our goal is to be aggressive and be ready to go for September.”

Tucker was unsure what will happen with the Keyin College building on Lemarchant Street.

As for the students, Tucker suspects they will not find the transition difficult, partly because they have been doing their courses online for the past year. That, coupled with the fact Bay Roberts is only about 15-minutes away from Carbonear, should make the shift relatively easy to make.

“It’s not going to be a massive transition either way,” Tucker said. “We’re also trying to put some supports in place if need be for students to help them, transportation-wise, if there’s a problem … There was really not a lot of push back on this, and I think the staff are really excited about a new facility.”

Tucker looks at it as a new start for Keyin in the region.

“We haven’t seen this as a negative, and now we’re just working our way through the challenges,” he said. “There’s always going to be adjustments, but we’re going to do everything we can to support the students in this transition.”