Most parents want kids to go to local schools, poll finds

Most people responding to a Greater Victoria school district survey on enrolment rules favour changes that would see more emphasis on students being able to attend neighbourhood schools.

Almost 3,400 parents took part in the survey, while 418 students answered a separate student survey.

“Sixty-one per cent of the people who responded basically said that keeping students in their catchment schools was the most important thing to them,” district superintendent Piet Langstraat said.

Current enrolment priorities rank returning students first, whether from a school’s catchment area or not, followed by siblings of those students, then catchmentarea students. The survey results keep returning students as the top priority, but give catchment-area students priority over siblings.

“This whole set of recommendations moves toward providing access to neighbourhood schools to kids who live in catchment,” Langstraat said.

District officials decided to conduct the survey because the district is poised to grow by about 2,000 students over the next decade — from about 19,000 to 21,000 students. Langstraat said any changes would not come immediately.

“Should the board approve them, we wouldn’t implement them until the 2018-19 school year,” he said. “It really is around giving parents and families and kids in the system time to think through the whole process and to allow some time for people to make decisions.”

Langstraat said he was happy to see that 15 per cent of survey respondents were parents of children who are not yet old enough for school. “That’s great because these changes will affect their children and their families for the entire duration that their child’s in school.”

Trustees had their first discussion about the proposed changes on Monday, with a number of parents in attendance. Langstraat said a decision on the survey’s outcome is expected at the end of June “so there will be plenty of opportunity for response and discussion.”

Langstraat said he has received emails expressing concern about the changes put forward. How siblings would be affected was discussed at length by a district committee that includes four parents.

“We talked about ‘grandfathering’ it,” Langstraat said. “But then, of course, the issue becomes: ‘How long do you grandfather it and to how many children?’ ”

He said the result might be that siblings can go to school together, but not necessarily to their parents’ school of choice.

Langstraat said he is aware that parents who registered children under one set of rules could be faced with another. But the district doesn’t want to be in a position where it can’t accommodate children whose families live close to a school and want to attend, he said.

Trustees will also discuss a proposal to cap international-student registration at 1,050 full-time equivalents.