TRACY SHERLOCK
The Vancouver Sun
School choice has created an eastwest divide in the preliminary list of Vancouver schools being considered for closure, education experts say.
The open-boundary philosophy, brought in by then-education minister Christy Clark in 2002, gives students the right to attend any school in the province, as long as it has space. That change destabilized community schools from the get-go, says Charles Ungerleider, a University of B.C. professor and former deputy education minister. When combined with underfunding and the astronomical price of housing in Vancouver, schools are shrinking and boards are faced with tough decisions such as closing schools, he said.
Jason Ellis, an assistant professor in the faculty of educational studies at UBC, doesn’t think underfunding is the issue that is causing schools to close. He pins the blame for school closures on government funding for private schools and declining enrolment caused by open boundaries.
“I think that raises a question of whether good planning policy (should create) a market where schools compete for students and each school tries to develop a niche program to draw students from another,” Ellis said. “It’s a policy that I doubt the government will revisit because it has a lot of support from parents. But it has a price, and maybe this (school closures) is the price.”
Although the Vancouver school board said last month it would only consider students who live in a school’s catchment area when determining which schools to close, in the end, the district looked at each school’s current population to see if the entire student body could move as a whole to a nearby school. But the list of 12 schools to be considered for closure contains only schools on the city’s east side, with the exception of one small annex on the west side.
“(The number of schools on the closure list from the east side) is a consequence of having emphasized schools of choice,” Ungerleider said. “That itself destabilized the relationship between a community and its schools. There is a larger story here too: Vancouver’s population is growing, but not with young families because of the price of housing. This is a byproduct of that situation.”
The Vancouver school board agreed earlier this year that it would not sell off school lands, although it might swap or sell portions of school lands. It passed a motion on Monday night that it would not lease any closed facilities to independent schools.
Both Ungerleider and school board chairman Mike Lombardi said they have not heard any educational rationale for the government’s requirement that schools be 95 per cent full before seismic upgrades will be done. Both also mentioned that Calgary schools are 85 per cent full, and it is increasing capacity to reduce that number. In the past couple of weeks, the education ministry appears to have softened its stance on the 95 per cent benchmark, with Education Minister Mike Bernier saying on Monday that it is a flexible target.
The VSB has asked for an urgent meeting with Bernier to discuss the district’s $21.8-million budget shortfall for next year. All school boards in the province have until June 30 to submit a balanced budget, something VSB has chosen not to do, leaving the board vulnerable to being fired by the ministry and replaced by an official trustee.
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