With Surrey students heading back to schools in classrooms bursting at the seams, one city councillor is proposing an out of the box solution to crowding.
Coun. Linda Annis wants Surrey to explore the concept of building new schools in the lower levels of residential towers proposed along the route of the new Surrey-Langley SkyTrain extension.
“Wouldn’t it be nice for families to just be able to take their kids down the elevator and take them off to school or daycare,” she said.
“We just need to look to big cities like New York or Boston. Those kids don’t have big playgrounds with a single-storey school. We need to be thinking really differently.”
Annis said an estimated 200,000 people are expected to move into the corridor between King George Boulevard and 200th Street, and that the city should be looking at ways to accommodate the future students that will live there.
“There’s pros and cons,” said Surrey Board of Education Vice-Chair Gary Tymoschuk.
“You can’t take away from the fact there won’t be any playgrounds for fields, or at least not the way we have them currently in schools, but I think we are very realistic in thinking the future is going to look different than it has in the past.”
Tymoschuk said the board has been looking at a variety of options to deal with over-capacity schools, and that staff have been in discussions with developers.
He said overcoming the green space issue is not impossible, and pointed to other major cities that have used city park space as an alternative to dedicated school fields.
“We’ve got to look at all the options. Hopefully we can work with the city of surrey on park space,” he said.
“We could hopefully piggyback of those and allow the kids to use those during the day.”
While development on the SkyTrain corridor is still years away, the district is already sagging under the pressure of new enrollments.
Tymoschuk estimated Surrey will add another 2,200 students this year alone. There are about 335 portables already in use, which he estimated could climb to 400 by this time next year.
That district-wide pressure is why Surrey District Parents’ Advisory Council president Rina Diaz feels Annis’ proposal would be of limited utility.
“It’s great, it totally is, but it only caters to that specific area. This new build, it doesn’t necessarily address the issues we are facing across the district, which is all of our schools bursting at the seams,” she said.
“We are beyond catching up. We are now in a state of crisis. And that’s what we are seeing across the entire district.”
Diaz wants to see the city use community amenity contributions (CAC) — fees that municipalities negotiate from developers seeking approval for new builds — to directly fund new school construction everywhere in Surrey.
She argued that using CAC money would allow the city to sidestep the lengthy process of working with the province to identify, plan and eventually build new facilities.
“Right there is the solution that could be applied citywide,” she said.
“We would not have to wait for the provincial government to act, if we’re in a crisis state.”
Annis said her proposal is not a silver bullet, but just one potential tool to try and address the city’s over-capacity schools.
She also wants to see the city explore public-private partnerships that could see schools built quickly with private financing that would be leased and eventually transferred back to public ownership.
“We do need to get on it right away,” she said.
“Last school year we had almost double the number of kids enter into our school system here in Surrey. We need to be looking at all avenues to get ahead of this.”