Western Canada: Vancouver school board looks to close schools in growing neighbourhoods

Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver this morning.

The calculus for figuring out how to match neighbourhood schools to fluxes in population has long been Sisyphean.

Skyrocketing housing prices in Vancouver mean fewer families sending their kids to some schools, leading to declining enrolments there. But the same housing crisis is also pushing governments to boost density and build more housing, thereby inviting more families to move into those same neighbourhoods in the future, as well as into new neighbourhoods.

The expansive playing fields of some currently underutilized properties could be the perfect place for such development, offering the Vancouver School Board much needed revenue. To counter anxious and angry parents who don’t want their local school to close, the VSB points to its forecasts of declining school populations.

But as Xiao Xu reports today, those predictions are at stark odds with numbers the provincial and city governments rely on. Parents in the Joyce-Collingwood neighbourhood are told by the City of Vancouver that more than 7,500 new residents have moved into the area between 2016 and 2021, and another 1,800 are expected to come in the next five years.

But the VSB maintains student population in the area is expected to drop by nearly 5,000 between 2022 and 2032. The board has proposed selling or leasing long-term a strip of land on the soccer field at at Graham D. Bruce Elementary School and to permanently shutter Sir Guy Carleton Elementary. (Carleton Elementary has been temporarily closed since 2016, when it was damaged by a severe fire.)

“There’s this huge disconnect,” said Michael Hooper, a professor of planning at the University of British Columbia and the parent of a child who attended the recently-closed Queen Elizabeth Annex on Vancouver’s west side.

The different numbers are a result of entirely different ways of counting. The Ministry of Education bases its data on numbers from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, Statistics Canada, BC Stats and private-sector economic forecasts.

The VSB relies on data gathered from Vital Statistics BC, which is updated every year and tracks the annual birth rate and on data from the Canada Revenue Agency to track child-care benefits.

VSB superintendent Helen McGregor said the district’s projections have been “incredibly accurate over time, and continue to be.”

In the middle are parents on either end of the spectrum, with those in Joyce-Collingwood arguing against any sell-off of currently underused school property, and parents elsewhere in the city waiting and waiting for new schools to be built in neighbourhoods bursting with growth.

Among the bustling condo towers of Olympic Village, parents have been waiting for 10 years for a school. Meantime, the city’s Broadway plan, which will be years in the realization, is expected to bring 50,000 new residents along the corridor, with many of them wanting school facilities in the Olympic Village area. Earlier this year, Premier David Eby said the school is a priority, but he wouldn’t commit to when.

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford has become aggressive about targeting school lands as potential areas for housing development. The Globe and Mail reported last month that Ontario’s Bill 98 empowers the government to direct a school board to sell an entire unused school site, portions of it or other board-owned property if it determines that land is not needed to meet current or future student needs for the next 10 years.

The legislation compels the province’s 72 school boards to provide the government with an inventory of schools that are not being used for learning and are leased out, administration buildings and empty parcels of land. The government decides whether to sell a property to another school board or use it for a provincial priority, such as a nursing home or housing, before putting it up for sale on the open market.

The move has alarmed school trustees, some of whom point to growth projections that show enrolment is expected to climb significantly, soon filling schools that are currently underutilized.

Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University’s City Program, said there are many different ways of predicting population growth and numbers can be impacted suddenly by unexpected things such as a pandemic or a swift change in federal policy around immigration.

During uncertainties, the first principle is “do no harm,” he said. And in this scenario, it means not to sell land.

“The minute that it’s sold, to say, a private sector developer, that is lost.”

This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.