PORTABLE PROBLEM
Students are heading back to class, but is the school system ready for them? Rob Shaw and Lori Culbert report.
Danielle Connelly, with 12-yeAr-old son Evan in front of A portable classroom At Glenbrook Middle school in New Westminster, has A variety of concerns about the growing number of portables Being used At many schools across the province. Accommodation is just one of many issues B.C.’s education system is facing just A few days Before the new school year Begins.
Parents looking for VICTORIA dramatic change in B.C.’s school system this year may instead find progress being made more slowly than expected on the promises of smaller class sizes, more teachers, better equipment and fewer portables.
Teachers, school boards and the provincial government say they’ve made big strides toward the goal of 3,700 new teachers, following a hiring spree last year that was the result of the Supreme Court of Canada ruling that restored class size and composition language the previous Liberal government had improperly stripped from teacher contracts.
“It’s the biggest hiring of teachers we’ve seen in probably B.C. history,” said Education Minister Rob Fleming. Though the province has set aside the money for the full complement of teachers, so far “well over 3,000” have actually been hired, said Fleming.
The province has struggled, though, to attract enough teachers to fill all the jobs, embarking on several high-profile recruiting trips to locales like France and Belgium in an attempt to drum up applicants.
With just days before classes begin, the website that lists all teacher job openings in B.C. still has nearly 600 postings, and some of those posts represent multiple jobs. For example, boards such as Abbotsford, Coquitlam, Surrey, Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows and Comox Valley need full-time or on-call French teachers at numerous schools, and many districts, including Chilliwack, Vancouver, Sunshine Coast, and Sea to Sky, are looking for on-call teachers for most schools.
All these teachers needed to be hired to shrink class sizes. The cap for students in kindergarten has dropped from 22 students to 20 after the court ruling, and the average size is currently 19 children. Grades 1 to 3 classes went from a cap of 24 kids to 22, and an average size of 20.
“Last school year we saw the best class sizes in this province for a couple decades,” said Glen Hansman, president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation.
“The amount of support for students with special needs also dramatically improved. Last school year was the first time we’ve been in a position to say, ‘Yes, numbers are coming down and things are getting better.’”
There have been some frustrating challenges, though, for students, parents and staff. On-call lists were mostly decimated, as many of those teachers took fulltime jobs, which often lead to specialist teachers, such as those who work with special-needs children, being pulled away and asked to cover off empty classrooms.
The government is pumping $372 million in additional funding into the education system this year. Compared to the previous Liberal government’s last budget, the NDP plans to spend $1 billion more on education over the next three years than was otherwise earmarked for classrooms.
Yet that deluge of cash may have also increased public expectations that many of the system’s chronically underfunded problems — everything from ancient computer labs, to outdated teaching materials and the perpetual threat of rural school closures — could be solved quickly.
There remain major obstacles: Finding enough new classroom space, updating supplies, adjusting to a new education curriculum, replenishing empty teacher-on-call lists and addressing a shortage of French immersion staff.
“We are facing some shortages, particularly of French immersion teachers, and in some cases Lower Mainland districts are having to curtail their planned expansions of French immersion programs,” Fleming said Thursday.
Both Fleming and Hansman, though, predicted this year would be less disruptive for parents and students. “I’m anticipating this school year is not going to be as bad. Hopefully we won’t have to see as many families having to wait until the 100th day of the school year until their child has a permanent teacher for the rest of the year. That will probably still happen in rural and remote areas of the province,” said Hansman.
B.C.’s school system will grow this year by an extra 1,737 children, compared with 2017, for a total of 538,821 students. More than half of B.C.’s school districts are reporting rising enrolment.
“We believe our postings are due to the anticipated increased enrolment we are experiencing,” said Evelyn Novak, superintendent of the Chilliwack School District, which has the highest number of postings (51) of all 60 districts on the province’s teacher-hiring website.
To reduce over-crowding in some locations, Chilliwack has reconfigured its schools for this fall into elementary (K-5), middle (6-8), and secondary sites, “which created additional opportunities for movement of teachers in our district,” Novak added.
In Metro Vancouver, the high cost of living and housing has made it especially difficult to recruit and retain people, said Hansman. Half of the teachers in the Vancouver school board district live outside the city, and many are finding themselves enticed to areas with cheaper housing and a shorter commute.
“The affordability issue was really playing itself out in Vancouver and that is affecting what parents are seeing in schools and what students are seeing in some cases: a revolving door of teachers,” said Hansman.
A Vancouver school board spokeswoman, though, insisted recruiting has been successful and every classroom will have a teacher on Tuesday, although some may be temporary until a permanent hire is made. Newly released VSB stats indicate that while enrolment is down slightly this year, the district has more teachers, including 900 on-call, an increase of 200 over September 2017.
In Surrey, the province’s largest and fastest-growing school district, the government is struggling to live up to its popular election promise to eliminate all school portables within four years. Instead, Surrey added portables last year and will add another 14 this year. More than 7,500 students will be in 333 portables across the district.
Fleming insisted it’s still possible to eliminate portables by the fall of 2021 as promised. “That’s the hope,” he said. It will require school construction to speed up, he said, pointing to progress made in expediting buildings through a new Surrey schools capital project office.
But Surrey’s school board chair has said eliminating portables “doesn’t look like it’s an achievable goal,” and the Liberal opposition has accused the NDP of making an election promise it knew was unrealistic in a desperate attempt to win votes.
Portables are a concern in smaller school districts, as well, such as New Westminster, which has added two more outside classrooms to the five it already had at Queen Elizabeth Elementary. It also has two new portables at Glenbrook Middle School, where Danielle Connelly’s son Evan is going into Grade 7 this September.
Many of the portables do not have running water, which can limit art or science projects in the classroom. It also requires walking outside to get to a bathroom, a big concern for younger grades, said Connelly, who has served on the parent advisory councils of her two sons’ elementary, middle and secondary schools.
At Glenbrook, the new portables were built on top of two of the school’s three basketball courts, reducing outdoor playing space. And 12-year-old Evan worries about social separation from the rest of the students if he ends up in one of the units.
Connelly, who is running for trustee in New Westminster, said districts should, in the short term, consider covered walkways, accessibility ramps, and plumbing to make the portables more userfriendly. “In the longer term, we need to be planning as a province and a school board: How are we going to address this?”
Teachers, meanwhile, are urging Fleming to do more on a laundry list of other issues provincewide.
Last school year was the first time we’ve been in a position to say, ‘Yes, numbers are coming down and things are getting better.’ GLEN HANSMAN, president, B.C. Teachers’ Federation
We are facing some shortages, particularly of French immersion teachers, and in some cases Lower Mainland districts are having to curtail their planned expansions of French immersion programs.