Time to consider reopening closed schools, teachers union says,

With student enrolment on the rise, now is the time to consider reopening closed Greater Victoria school district facilities. That’s the message from Greater Victoria Teachers’ Association president Jason Gammon.

Enrolment in the district — sitting at about 19,000 — is expected to increase by 2,000 over the next 10 years.

Topping Gammon’s list of buildings to open is the former Richmond Elementary School, which closed its doors in 2004 during a period of enrolment decline. Other elementary schools closed in the same time frame include Hampton, Blanshard and Lampson.

Putting Richmond back to full use is “a no-brainer,” Gammon said. “It is ready to go now.”

The two elementary schools nearest to Richmond — Willows and Oaklands — are both quite full, Gammon said, and opening Richmond could help relieve pressures.

Willows and Oaklands have been put forward as possible sites for portables, along with Campus View and Quadra elementary schools.

Richmond could be opened at some point, said district superintendent Piet Langstraat, but it has been valuable as a site for school communities that relocate during seismic refits.

Most recently, Cloverdale Elementary students and teachers spent the 2015-16 school year there.

“So we need the space,” Langstraat said. “And as we look into next year and the years after, especially right now with the Ministry of Education talking about potential capital funding, it would be really short-sighted of us to fill up Richmond school as a regular school and then find out six months down the road that we get a seismic upgrade at one of our elementary schools and we have nowhere to put the students.”

Along with that, district officials are working on a longterm facilities plan, Langstraat said.

“We certainly own a number of portables and that’s the temporary solution,” he said.

“As we look again at recovering space and opening schools in the future, that needs to obviously be well-planned out and well-thought out, and that’s exactly what we’re doing.”