The plan to upgrade B.C. schools that are deemed at risk of being damaged in an earthquake appears to have undergone a seismic shift.

The engineering contractor for the provincial Ministry of Education estimates that dozens of schools waiting for earthquake repairs will be forced to wait years longer than originally promised.

In 2005, the provincial government promised to make all B.C. schools seismically safe by 2020.

Now, the timeline estimates that work on schools outside the City of Vancouver will be completed by 2025. Schools in the city may not be finished until 2030.

The province hopes that work will be finished before each of those dates.

At a press conference on Friday, Education Minister Peter Fassbender offered an explanation for why the 2020 date looks like it will not be met.

“When this program was announced, the objectives were very clear: to make schools safe for every single child in the province,” Fassbender said. “What we didn’t know was the reality once you start getting into it and you take down walls and you look at foundations and all of the engineering that’s necessary to achieve that goal.”

In order to reflect their new knowledge of the complexity of the undertaking, the province doubled the budget for the seismic upgrades from $1.2 billion to $2.4 billion, Fassbender said.

He said the province has already “secured” 213 schools, of which 145 have had upgrades completed, 11 are under construction, 9 are in project development, and 48 are in the planning stage.

Fassbender placed the blame for delays on projects in the City of Vancouver at the feet of the Vancouver School Board.

“The money has been there -- is there -- to do all of the projects in Vancouver,” he said. “The funding has never been an issue. What has been an issue is the inability of the Vancouver School Board to bring forward project definitions.”

The VSB and the province have been at odds over seismic upgrades for years. Past disagreements have focused on what repairs need to be done -- or whether some schools should be replaced entirely.

There are 126 high-risk schools still in need of upgrades around the province, 69 of which are located in Vancouver.

Former VSB chairperson Patti Bacchus tweeted on Friday that a 10-year delay for seismic upgrades is “shocking” and “unacceptable,” saying it would “put lives at risk.”

For Debra Legge, a Vancouver School Board employee whose daughter is in grade 11 at a school in need of seismic upgrading, the delays still reflect poorly on the provincial government.

“I don’t know what their priorities are,” Legge said. “Obviously it’s not our kids, not our staff. They’re not taking care of them.”

But current VSB chairperson Christopher Richardson told CTV News he’s heard no specific date for when seismic upgrading will be complete, and he’s not interested in debating when it will be done or whose fault it is.

“The disagreements of the past, let’s put them behind us,” Richardson said. “Let’s move forward. Certainly, the current trustees are looking for cooperation and collaboration on a project that’s so important like this.”