North Vancouver mom Devan Gee remembers when all the primary classes at Ridgeway Elementary put on a concert for their families after the school’s reopening.
Those days are gone now, she says. There are so many kids at the Lonsdale area school, which her youngest daughter still attends, that concerts are put on in batches – with different nights for different grades, concerts divided between Christmas and spring, and a ticket system to control numbers in the audience.
It’s just one small symptom of a school in a rapidly growing area of North Vancouver that’s bursting at the seams.
Ridgeway has an official capacity of 485 students, but there are 540 students at the school this year, making it one of the most crowded in North Vancouver. Next year, the school enrolment is projected to rise to 570.
A large modular building that had previously been sitting empty at the former Cloverley school site in Lower Lonsdale was moved to the Ridgeway school grounds to provide more classroom space, which will expand its capacity significantly.
The building does provide a temporary fix, but “it really does take up most of the back field at Ridgeway,” cutting into the kids’ outside play area, says parent Melissa McConchie.
McConchie says while the community of teachers and parents at the school is excellent, overcrowding is becoming a concern.
Regardless of how many portables are added, “It’s not ideal to have a huge elementary school,” says McConchie. “It’s really overwhelming for young kids to deal with that kind of population.”
Building a new elementary school in the Lower Lonsdale area is in the North Vancouver School District’s capital plan, which alerts the province that it will be needed in the future.
Preliminary estimates for land costs are pegged at $10 million while the cost of building a new school is estimated at $17.6 million. Both costs would be borne by the provincial government.
But there have been no formal requests made yet to the province to fund the project, said superintendent Mark Pearmain, which likely wouldn’t be granted unless all nearby schools were already full. It could then be four or five years before a school was actually built.
Meanwhile enrolment pressure in the Lower Lonsdale area is continuing to increase.
Long-range planners for the school district have predicted that about 1,000 more students are expected to enrol in North Vancouver in the next five to 10 years.
It’s a trend McConchie says she’s already seen.
“We’ve lived here for 10 years,” she says. “I’ve really noticed a change in the demographics. There’s a lot more (kids), under the age of five even.”
Many more families are living in apartments, she said. “There’s so much building all around us.”
Ridgeway isn’t the only school facing enrolment pressures.
Portables are going in at Brooksbank, Dorothy Lynas, Highlands, Ross Road and Lynn Valley schools. “Capilano is full,” said Pearmain.
Given the current space crunch at Ridgeway, some parents at the school are now questioning the decision of the school district to close the nearby 80-student primary-grade-only Ridgeway Annex school in 2011 and merge that school’s population with that of a renovated Ridgeway Elementary.
The school district later sold that land to property developer Anthem for $5.1 million.
“People are very upset about the Annex having been closed,” said McConchie. “Why did they not just keep it open until they had a new (Lower Lonsdale school) site?”
At the time, the district was facing pressure from declining enrolment and needed to pay back its debt from other school rebuild projects.
Since that time, enrolment in North Vancouver has been rebounding – especially at the elementary school level.
“I don’t think anybody could have projected out the rapid densification we’ve been seeing across Metro Vancouver,” said Pearmain. A variety of housing options in the Lonsdale area have also made it more popular with families.
More recently, B.C. teachers won a court case forcing the creation of more classes. All of that has contributed to a space crunch in local schools.
Both Gee and McConchie said they hope that when a new school is built, it will be big enough.
Currently at Ridgeway, “the school is not big enough for the population they said it would be big enough for,” said Gee.
“I’ve heard a lot about what’s been happening in Surrey,” said McConchie. “They build a new school, then before it’s even open, they’re putting in portables.”
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