Parents and students are anxious about the Vancouver School Board’s plans that could see the school closure debate formally reopened in the city.
Shaun Kalley, chair of Vancouver District Parents Association (DPAC) and father of a daughter in Grade 7 at Charles Dickens elementary, said parents are on edge.
“They want to understand and have more information,” he said. “They feel gas lit because they are getting one story that doesn’t match up with what is in the report.”
He’s talking about comments at a recent VSB committee meeting at which secretary-treasurer David Green said a report recently released by the board is not a school-closure report, but rather a high-level road map about how to manage the district’s $7.6 billion in land and buildings.
While Green is technically correct, Kalley says the facilities plan is the first step.
“This is about school closures. This is going right down the road to school closures. Road maps have goals,” Kalley said at the meeting. “We have now put school communities under immense pressure.”
Kalley pushed further, urging the district to take school closures off the table if they aren’t part of the plan.
But Green said the closure analysis in the report is necessary for making decisions and prioritizing seismic upgrade projects. He said the goals of the report are to maximize operating funding for student programs – Vancouver spends a disproportionate amount of its budget on maintenance compared to other districts – and to get students into seismically safe schools.
The province will only fund seismic upgrades for the number of students actually attending schools in the district, and they’re not approving new schools or expansions in Vancouver at the moment either, Green said.
All of this leaves Vancouver school trustees with some very difficult choices ahead.
If any schools were to close, an official consideration list would be created by September, with closures happening no sooner than June 2020.
The district says it has more than 10,000 empty seats in its schools, a number projected to grow in the next eight years to 12,000. That excess room is mostly found in old, dilapidated schools that are not safe if an earthquake hits and that need millions of dollars in maintenance.
But Kalley says parents, students and teachers don’t see those empty spaces and believe the standards used to calculate excess space are wrong and don’t work well with old schools.
“One of the things we’ve heard a lot of from parents is that the capacity numbers for their school are way off and they do not represent the educational use of space,” Kalley said. “Classrooms that have been converted into libraries or music rooms are counted as empty.”
Deborah Stern Silver, a parent from Point Grey, urged the VSB to slow down the decision-making process. Point Grey secondary is in a heritage building on the city’s west side, which Stern Silver said was listed as a high priority for a seismic upgrade in 2004. They’re still waiting 15 years later.
“The uncertainty is really, really unsettling,” Stern Silver said. “The students are terrified that their community will be torn apart. Take out the school and that tears the heart out of the community.”
Three parents from Queen Alexandra elementary, on the city’s east side, urged the VSB consider selling or leasing some of its assets, like Kingsgate Mall or its Broadway head office, before closing east side schools. One parent, Carl Chen, who is also a commercial real estate broker, gave a presentation about significant development happening in the city and said density is increasing much faster on the east side.
“This is about the future of our entire city … these schools are the heart of our communities,” Chen said.
There are two public consultation meetings, one on April 11 and one on April 16, and the report is expected to be revised before April 11.
Kalley urges parents to register to speak at the next VSB facilities meeting on April 17.
“All PACs have a legislated opportunity to be heard by the VSB and this is the last opportunity for that to be honoured (for the LRFP),” Kalley said. “Once there is a school closure list, I would imagine that only the schools that are on that list would have an opportunity to be heard.”
The rest of 2019 promises to be troublesome and fractious for Vancouver schools. But the only chance parents, teachers and students have of being heard and making a difference is if they speak out.
tracy.sherlock@gmail.com
