About 100 Langley parents are up in arms over a three-way property swap that will have land previously designated for an elementary school turned into a row of townhouses.
The parents are upset that a 5.6-hectare area of land on 70th Avenue and 200 Street acquired by the school district and the Township between 2000 and 2004 for a future school and park is now being sold to a developer who wants to turn it into 103 town houses.
“There is massive unhappiness here,” said Pete Pretorius, who lives across the street on 70th Avenue. “They call it deceit. They call it underhanded and all sorts of nasty words.”
The angry parents plan to protest the sale at a school board meeting Tuesday night.
Like many families in the Routley Ridge neighbourhood in south Willoughby, Pretorius and his wife Ilona purchased their home on the expectation their kids could go to a school nearby.
“As a parent you try to plan things to the benefit of your children, so we feel misled,” said Ilona, pointing out that the two nearby elementary schools – Langley Meadows and R.C. Garnett – are already bursting at the seams.
Their two kids still go to their old school in Cloverdale because the only neighbourhood school that could take them, Willoughby Elementary, was farther away.
School district spokesman Craig Spence said although the land was designated a school, it doesn’t mean it always gets used for such a purpose.
“It is not our plan to build a school for that site anymore,” he said. “From our perspective, the demographics has changed.”
Spence said the population pressure is now located in north Willoughby where land at 20626 84th Avenue, formerly owned by the developer, will be acquired by the school.
The agreement for the swap has been drawn up, but not yet signed, said Spence.
But even if the swap was cancelled, it remains “unlikely” that a school will be built there, he said.
It is the Ministry of Education which decides which new schools get built, but it is the city council’s decision whether to approve the re-zoning application for the proposed town houses site.
Parents already came out en masse for a May 9 council meeting, but council deferred the matter to June.
Township engineering manager Ramin Seifi estimates the Routley Ridge neighbourhood is already 95 per cent developed, while the other area, called Yorkson, which has only seen its first homes go up about five years ago, is just starting its development boom.
But that’s little consolation to parents who are fed up with overcrowding at schools – which they say will only get worse if the townhouse development gets a green light – and furious at what they consider an underhanded switcheroo.
“We would like to see the deal reversed,” said Caralee Randall, president of the Willoughby Homeowners Association.
“Keep it as a school site, and if they don’t have money to build a school yet, build a park out if that’s what they have to do.”
Randall said the need in the neighborhood for a school is dire and questions where the school district is getting its projected enrolment numbers that says the need is elsewhere.
Routley Ridge already has “warm bums in seats that’s been waiting for a school for seven years,” she said.
“The mandate is already to serve the children that are here. They’re not up in Yorkson yet.”
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