Vancouver School Board staff are recommending the historic yellow schoolhouse on the General Gordon elementary site be demolished, but conservationists are still hoping to save it.
The recommendation, which comes after the VSB tried but failed to find an organization to fix and lease the arts and crafts-style building, will be discussed at the Feb. 22 planning and facilities meeting.
Although the main General Gordon elementary school was knocked down in January 2015 to make way for a new school, which opened this school year, heritage activists have spent months lobbying to preserve the century-old schoolhouse.
Anne Guthrie-Warman, a Heritage Vancouver representative, plans to be at Wednesday’s meeting and remains hopeful it won’t be knocked down. If it is, the VSB will have few remaining historic buildings in Kitsilano, she said. Guthrie-Warman called the schoolhouse a “character” building that has key associations with important Vancouver figures such as Dal Richards and Jimmy Pattison who practiced in it when they were involved in the Kitsilano Boys Band.
“It has a lot of heritage connotations. It would be really terrible to take it out and demolish it to put in more parking or a slightly larger playground in a playground that’s quite substantial already,” she said.
Last March, trustees, who have since been fired and replaced by a single government-appointed trustee — Dianne Turner, voted unanimously to save the building as long as a group came forward to cover the costs of upgrading and maintaining it.
Four groups submitted proposals to the school board. The proposals envisioned using the building as a for-profit Montessori pre-school, as a youth centre, as an independent Montessori school or as a museum/community centre.
Three of the proposals didn’t meet the VSB’s criteria while the independent Montessori school proposal did. Negotiations started, including talks about city’s requirements, but the Montessori school withdrew its proposal in December.
“After several months of good faith negotiations, conversations came to an impasse and the proponent made the decision to end negotiations,” the school board report states.
School board staff say the building is in poor condition and it’s past its useful life. It would cost a significant amount of money to make it useable.
The existing school site is also small and the VSB received some feedback suggesting the space should be used as part of the outdoor play area for students.
Guthrie-Warman maintains funding could still be found to save the building.
“There’s quite a lot of money in the ministry right now. It’s not like [the VSB] can’t go back to the minister and say we want to retain this. There are also grants. We told them this when we made our case in the first place,” she said. “We’re hoping we can persuade them it’s an important enough issue and the community supports it. The [West] Kitsilano Residents’ Association also supports it — it isn’t just Heritage Vancouver… I’m hopeful that they’ll listen, at least, and, if there’s enough of a presence [at the meeting] and there’s enough of a community response to this, that it may be something that they take another look at.”
General Gordon elementary school’s parent advisory committee posted an update about the schoolhouse on the school website. It indicates the PAC executive had written twice to the VSB to express its belief the outbuilding, or the space it occupies, should be used to benefit the Gordon community. The parent group also points out the VSB has a “duty to inform and consult with the Gordon community before committing to any particular usage, so that parents can express their views.
“In the absence of an acceptable proposal to use the outbuilding, we are in favour of demolition and construction of more playground,” the update reads, which also asks parents to let the PAC executive know their views by writing to the executive.
Jim Meschino, the VSB’s director of facilities, told the Courier it will be up to trustee Dianne Turner to determine what’s best. The next board meeting after this week's committee meeting is March 7.
In the meantime, the schoolhouse doesn’t have proper fire protection. Several services have been disconnected, including a connection to a panel in the main building, which would signal if there is a fire.
There are also a lot of existing demands on the school site. In addition to the school population of about 380 students, there is a Montessori program operating in the main building, as well as a before-and-after-school program.
“Generally, we’d like to move forward on this. We’re really far past the date that the board had set for making a decision, which was May of 2016, I think, so staff have consumed a considerable amount of time and effort and cost to try and figure this one out,” Meschino said. “We would have loved that this proponent would have been able to make it, but it wasn’t an easy process.”
The Montessori school would have had to get a development permit, including holding public consultation, they would have to get a building permit, a new hydrant would need to be located near the building and it would need new service utility connections.
“So this is not simple. A lot of people may think this is simple for somebody to just come along and re-purpose it, but it’s not,” Meschino said. “It would have its own address. It would be its own building, separate from the [main] school. And that’s a several-year process for anybody wanting to come do that.”
The VSB looked into moving the building, which wasn’t feasible.
Contractors suggested it would need to be sawed in half and taken away in pieces. That wasn’t advisable because it’s a simple frame building that doesn’t have the structural integrity to be taken off site that way. If it was removed as a whole building, a lot of trees would be lost.
“So [there was that]. And then, initially, we wanted to reposition it on the school site. That was too expensive. This was kind of our last-ditch effort to see if we could make this building viable, but it doesn’t appear that we have any takers at this point,” Meschino said.
noconnor@vancourier.com
