Dan Fumano: As Vancouver plans future, families plead: Don’t forget schools

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With Vancouver considering where and how to add 50,000 residents to the Broadway corridor, it raises an important question: Where will the kids go to school?

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The Broadway plan, before city council this month, says city hall is working closely with the Vancouver school board (VSB) to ensure they can accommodate additional demand on schools created by population and job growth.

But some parents view that claim skeptically, especially when they look at Hinge Park, at the broadway plan area’s northern edge. This grassy patch at 161 Columbia Street was identified by the city in 2007 as the site for a future elementary school. Fifteen years later, a vibrant neighborhood has grown around it, but it’s not clear when construction might begin on that school.

It’s not a trivial matter. When neighborhoods lack a school, or when kids can’t get into the overcapacity school down the block from their home, it has significant impacts not only on kids and parents — including this columnist — but on neighborhoods and broader society. The resulting outcomes work directly against the goals of most city planners, including Vancouver’s, around climate, traffic congestion, complete communities and building resilient social networks.

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But some of Vancouver’s most vocal critics of this particular failure of planning — including the city’s former top planner — also emphasize it’s not a reason to reject the Broadway plan, or to delay building badly needed housing, especially family friendly apartments in denser areas near transit . Instead, they say, they want governments to figure out how to work together and do better.

Lisa McAllister moved into an apartment in Olympic Village in 2015, expecting the long-promised elementary school would be open before she had a child. Media reports in 2007 said the school would be built before the 2010 Olympics began.

McAllister had a daughter and son over the past seven years, but there was still no school in sight. So the family, who don’t own a car, opted for home-schooling. It was sad, she said, to see the dissolving of the community of neighbors her family met through their daycare when the children were younger.

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“Everybody knew each other, and pretty much all of those kids have moved away. And a big part of it is the school situation is such a mess,” she said.

Planning and building schools is clearly complex. Demand for school spaces has emerged in recent years in higher-density neighborhoods in Vancouver’s northern half, but the district has seen an 8.4 per cent decline in enrollment over the past decade even while overall population has steadily grown. The effort requires collaboration between city hall and the school board to plan for future needs, and with the province, which provides construction funding.

McAllister isn’t particularly interested in apportioning blame between the various government entities, but simply wants to see results.

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“Why do we send our kids to school?” McAllister said. “So that they can learn problem-solving, and how to work together. And it feels like those things are missing in this situation.”

Matt Shillito, Vancouver’s acting director of special projects, said the city has more control over other kinds of amenities, like Olympic Village’s well-loved Creekside Community Center, “because we hold the purse strings for that.” On the other hand, the city can plan and provide space for schools but needs provincial money to build them.

Shillito said questions on the Olympic Village timeline or future school planning would be better directed to the school district.

The school district said it has prioritized the Olympic Village school in funding requests to the province since 2006-2007. “But,” said deputy superintendent David Nelson, “up until now it hasn’t been supported by the ministry, and I would defer to the ministry directly for the specific reasons for that.”

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No one at BC’s Ministry of Education and Child Care was available for an interview. The ministry didn’t answer emailed questions about reasons for Olympic Village delays or plans for Broadway area school expansion but sent a statement saying the government was “committed to building a new school for Olympic Village families in this fast-growing community.”

The ministry’s statement added: “Local boards of education and district staff know their communities best, and that’s why we rely on them to provide us with a five-year capital plan submission and (long-range facilities plan) that best identify the needs of their community.”

The VSB, in its own emailed statement, said the new school for Olympic Village is the “top priority” for funding, and “has been requested for many years” in the neighborhood that “continues to experience a steady increase in school-aged children .” While waiting for money from the province for the Olympic Village school, the VSB said it works to place kids from that neighborhood in schools in other neighborhoods like Riley Park.

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This creates ripple effects in other neighbourhoods. With no school in Olympic Village today, the neighborhood’s current catchment school is Simon Fraser Elementary in Mount Pleasant, which the VSB’s latest statistics show operating at 185 per cent capacity, because several students attend class in portables. The stats forecast that by 2029 Fraser Elementary will be at 238 per cent capacity.

The Broadway plan says the VSB has requested funding for expansions to three existing schools in and around the area, as well as the future Olympic Village school, and has identified that another elementary school for 300 to 550 students will be needed in the area in the next 30 years.

But even when a state-of-the-art school is built, there is no guarantee neighborhood kids can actually get a desk.

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Brent Toderian was frustrated by this problem when he was Vancouver’s chief planner from 2006 to 2012. But it became staff early 2020 when he learned his son couldn’t attend the new overcapacity Crosstown Elementary across the street from their downtown apartment.

However, Toderian disagrees with opponents of density and development who wield the issue of school capacity to oppose the Broadway plan or other efforts to build badly needed housing. Instead, he said, the council should approve the Broadway plan, and also urge the province to fix the “broken system” for funding and constructing schools.

“The fact that the school-building process needs to be much more proactive isn’t a reason to fail to plan badly needed new housing on public transit that achieves so many public interest goals,” Toderian said. “That would be a broken tail wagging the dog. Fix the part of the system that’s broken.”

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