‘Something has to change’: Surrey schools could stack portables amid surging enrollment

A Surrey school trustee is warning that the city’s portable problem is getting worse and the district may soon have to stack units to accommodate more students.

Surrey Board of Education finance chair Terry Allen said the district’s capital allocation this year is enough to cover 750 new seats. Meanwhile, the district — already B.C.’s largest — is adding about 2,200 new students every year as the city continues to grow.

0:48 Surrey high school gets 500-seat expansion

The volume of portables in the district has grown so large that schools are running out of space for them, he added.

“We have nowhere to put portables, and the most important part of the portables to the parents in Surrey is all costs for portables come out of the operating budget — $350,000 to buy a portable and place it, and that’s if we can just drop a portable in a playground now,” he said.

“We’re at a point now where we’re going to have to start to consider to stack portables, something that I don’t know if it’s ever been done.”

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. That number has now grown to more than 360, with estimates the number could top 400 by 2025.

2:15 Surrey parents upset over growing number of portables

BC United Surrey South MLA Elenore Sturko accused the NDP government of failing “spectacularly” in what she described as a “grandiose promise.”

“People are really frustrated,” she said.

“They’re taking away funds that would be used for other programming, for paying for salaries of other custodial staff. They have to find ways to cut the budget in order to bring in these portables — it’s an absolute lack of foresight by this government that’s now in its second term.”

Sturko said the Surrey district’s current woes don’t factor in problems coming down the pipeline with the construction of the Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension, and the expected growth in residential density that will come with it.

“We need urgent capital funding and urgent approval of capital projects to have expansions,” she said.

1:48 The Surrey school district already earmarked more than 340 portables this year

NDP Education and Child Care Minister Rachna Singh returned fire, accusing BC United of starving the Surrey School District of capital funding when it was last in office.

“We are playing catch-up. The previous government neglected the needs of the surrey students, the surrey community in their tenure, in the last four years no schools were built and there was only one expansion,” Singh said in an interview.

“Since 2017 we have been able to open six new schools and 11 expansions.”

Asked directly about the NDP’s promise to eliminate portables, she said that’s still “where we want to go,” but added that the city is facing unprecedented growth. The government, she added, is in close communication with the school district and working to deal with its enrollment pressures.

The province maintains that 12 new projects or expansions are in the pipeline for the city.

Allen said the district needs a massive infusion of capital cash sooner than later.

“Portables will be a way of life in Surrey as long as we have the increase in enrollment every year that we have,” he said.

“Something has to change and I know there’s only so much money — we’re not stupid, we all understand that. But I just think you cannot continue to ignore the students and parents of the Surrey School District.