Highrise high schools become an option

A five-storey secondary school? It’s hard to imagine, but by 2020, Sydney, New South Wales, will have five new highrise and multistorey public schools that together will educate more than 6,000 students at a cost of more than $200 million.

Enrolments have skyrocketed by between three and five times the longterm N.S.W. average over the past four years, according to a Fairfax Media analysis of N.S.W. Department of Education figures.

Sydney’s dense geography has created a fundamental shift in the way schools are envisioned. The Department of Education’s projections suggest that 45,000 children will not have classrooms unless capacity is rapidly expanded, especially in the metropolitan region.

With limited availability of space to build new schools, the future of school design has planners looking “up,” with basketball courts on rooftops, hanging gardens, flexible classrooms, online delivery and libraries that integrate with the communities they serve, not just the students they teach.

Other options in the plan include partnerships with developers and councils to provide funding for school infrastructure that can be shared with local communities; “modular classroom blocks;” and larger schools on smaller sites.

There are at least nine highrise schools on stream across Australia, with the N.S.W., Victorian and South Australian governments all pursuing tenders.

Planners anticipate increased adoption of joint and shared use of school and community facilities as part of the changing mindset in building the schools of the future.

N.S.W. Education Minister Rob Stokes has declared the state government must embark on a $5-billion “redefining” of schools to meet an unprecedented explosion in student numbers in the next 15 years and relieve chronic overcrowding.

Long-term plans include a N.S.W. government commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 10 years alone to build new schools and infrastructure for an additional 1,600 classrooms.

While declining student enrolment in British Columbia has been the story since the early 1980s, in B.C’s public schools, enrolment is expected to rise again this year, for just the second time in nearly 20 years.

The B.C. Ministry of Education count indicates that about 557,630 students enrolled in public schools for kindergarten to Grade 12 in the 2016-17 school year.

That’s up about 4,253 from 2015-16, due to families moving to B.C. from other provinces, students returning to the public system from private schools and higher-than-expected international immigration.

Education Minister Mike Bernier is quoted as saying: “This is the second year in a row we’ve seen provincewide increases in enrolment.”

With long-term projections for a 2,000-student increase in the Greater Victoria School District over the next decade — from the current 19,000 to about 21,000 — planning will no longer be about reducing classroom space.

The district anticipates that some schools will be challenged to accommodate the demand for catchment students.

As certain neighbourhoods grow and demographics change, some schools are experiencing pressures already.

The city of Surrey is expecting 1,000 more students in its schools, many of which are bursting at the seams. Its district projects that it will grow by a further 5,014 students to 74,710 by September 2022.

The Sooke and Central Okanagan school districts are also growing significantly, the ministry said.

In the Vancouver School District, the Ministry of Education anticipates a continued increase in K-12 enrolment from the current 55,000 beginning in 2017-18, while independent projections indicate a further enrolment increase will occur in 2018-19.

In the long term, the B.C. Ministry of Education estimates that across B.C., enrolment is projected to rise by 40,000 students by 2024.

If there could be infallible mathematical or statistical models for people whose job it is to forecast population growth, facilities planning would be a simple game.

But since humans are an inconsistent group and human decisions to move, have children, change jobs and so on are comparatively unpredictable, enrolment projection models tend to be more Vegas than UBC postgrad math.

So while a decline in B.C.’s student enrolment had, until recently, become a predictable certainty, recent increases along with the increasing difficulty of finding suitable property for new schools might have planners, like their colleagues in New South Wales, looking “up.”

Highrise schools in B.C.? Not yet — but never say never.