A Surrey, B.C., councillor is raising concerns with the information in a report about the city’s eligible school sites, approved by mayor and council Monday night.
The report, which forms part of the 2024 to 2025 capital plan, estimates the Surrey School District will see 9,777 new school-age students in the next decade, based on anticipated construction of 51,490 new housing units, including secondary suites. That means the district will need a dozen new schools, one replacement site and one expansion over the 10-year period.
In an interview with Global News, Coun. Linda Annis said she reluctantly voted to approve the report because she believes the numbers it is projecting are far too low.
“The city and the school district forecast 51,000 new housing units over the next 10 years, but only 9,700 children — those numbers just don’t seem right to me,” she said.
Annis said she also intends to ask staff to review the formula the city uses to develop its projections. She said the city is already closing in on 400 portables, and continues to fall behind every year amid surging enrollment.
“Each and every year we are off on the numbers and we need to get them right,” she said. “We’re the portable capital of British Columbia and its not fair to our students.”
At Monday’s meeting, Surrey Mayor Brenda Locke also said she was “hesitant” to support the report, but did so because “not supporting it will only take us into the next school year and we just can’t have any more delays.”
Locke said she was encouraged the report was “solution-oriented,” and that it called on the district and the city to write to the Ministry of Education and Child Care together expressing their concerns. She said the province needs to step up with more funding for the district and speed up the school site acquisition.
“When council turned back the district’s capital plan last December we did so because we were actually tired of having the sea of portables we have in Surrey today,” she said.
“No other municipality in the province has as many portables in Surrey, and in fact we have more children learning in portables than some entire school districts have. We just can’t stand for this.”
Monday’s meeting was a second attempt to get the report approved by council.
Last month, it unanimously rejected the Surrey School District’s “Eligible School Sites Proposal 2024‐2025 Capital Plan,” seeking more information from staff on the enrollment estimates.
It was a move the Surrey Board of Education’s chair called “unprecedented.” At the time, Laurie Larsen told Global News council approval of the document is usually a formality, and it was crafted with the city’s own data.
Annis had said she voted against due to questions about the numbers.
Locke had explained that the school district’s budget was presented to council prior to B.C.’s passing of new legislation expected to boost density in Surrey. That density would likely boost school registration, meriting a second evaluation of the growth estimates, she added.
The corporate report before council on Monday acknowledged the earlier concerns that the projected student numbers weren’t accurately reflecting Surrey’s potential growth.
Staff have since clarified that the estimates in the eligible school sites plan are specific to students from “new home construction only, and do not capture the full picture of enrolment growth, which is also driven by increased student numbers in existing housing stock.”
“The formula just isn’t accurate, and it doesn’t take into account modern realities, which include more young families in townhomes, seniors downsizing and selling to families with children, and the fact that families with children are living in apartments,” Annis said in Monday release.
“Year after year, more children are showing up at the start of the school year than were planned. That fact alone should tell us that we’re using the wrong formula.”
Monday’s report states that the City of Surrey and Surrey School District will explore other methods of data collection that could narrow the gap between real student growth and projected student growth, as well as monitor the effects of new housing legislation and adjust its projections in future eligible school site plans.
It adds that the number of new school sites needed “greatly exceeds the number of new schools funded by the provincial government,” with the disparity partially due to high cost of land for building them.
In an emailed statement, the Ministry of Education said school districts make their own enrolment projects, but the province is working with Surrey and the Surrey School District to “engage a suitable facilitator to assist in resolving” ongoing concerns with the projections.
Right now, the eligible school sites plan estimates that over 10 years, the Surrey School District will need about 57 hectares of land with a serviced land cost of $602.3 million. The district currently has about 78,000 enrolled students and 400 portables.
To address growing need, the B.C. government has approved funds to build a new 612-student Snokomish Elementary School, slated to open in 2025. The school district, meanwhile, is planning to build the new Ta’talu Elementary this year.
Capacity additions are also slated for South Meridian Elementary and Semiahmoo Trail Elementary.
In 2017, the BC NDP promised that if elected, it would eliminate portables in Surrey schools by 2020.
At the time, there were 250 portables in the city. Since 2017, the Ministry of Education said it has completed at least 16 new schools and expansions in Surrey kids, compared to zero new schools and one expansion completed between 2014 to 2017 by its predecessor.
It has approved more than $750 million in capital projects to create more than 12,400 new student seats in Surrey, it added.
“The previous government failed to invest in schools even while Surrey was beginning to grow, which has left the province in a situation of having to play catch up,” the ministry said.
It did not answer a question about when it will meet its 2017 portables promise.
— with files from Simon Little
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