News that Pitt Meadows will have its aging high school replaced, that Harry Hooge Elementary in Maple Ridge will be expanded, and that Whonnock Elementary is getting an HVAC upgrade are all welcome.
But in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows, and in its neighbouring outer-suburban communities, the school expansions just aren’t keeping up.
Suburban expansion tends to come in waves, and we’ve just gone through a big one. During the pandemic, thousands of residents of Vancouver and its inner suburbs fled their condos and headed east. They were seeking more space – maybe the classic suburban backyard, or at least one of the new townhouses that have been springing up everywhere during the last decade.
Many of these new arrivals either have young children, or are looking for somewhere with room to start a family.
Either way, it’s putting a strain on local resources for families, and the most important of those resources are schools.
The problem is that the province of B.C. has had a long-standing policy of not loosening the purse strings to allow for a new school until there is “demand.”
In other words, until the other nearby schools are bursting at the seams and portables are sprouting like mushrooms after the rain.
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There have been good reasons for this policy.
The history of British Columbia is full of examples of plans for growth that went awry. There have been property booms that suddenly went bust going back literally to the foundation of this province.
The fear for the provincial and local governments is that they would throw hundreds of millions of dollars into building new schools, only to see the wave of growth crest, or even just slow down, leaving some of those expensive new schools half-empty.
It’s a legitimate fear, but once foundations have been poured and houses, townhouses, and condos are being flung up, we should probably assume that they’ll be filled.
The provincial government needs to speed up the process of approving new schools, at least in the near future. With high immigration levels planned for the next several years, and with Metro Vancouver a locus for jobs in B.C., we shouldn’t expect things to slow down much.
Schools are more than just places for kids to learn during the days. They’re a basic building block of every community, providing a safe haven, a playground, and some of the functions of a community centre.
Getting schools built as fast as possible, where they’re needed, should be a higher priority.