Saturday March 4, 2023 | LANGFORD, BC [Updated 1:35 pm]
by Mary P Brooke | Island Social Trends
Students in Port Renfrew are in need of a school. Not only would it mean avoiding a 1.5 hour school bus ride both ways (from their town into Sooke and back again at the end of the school day), it would add to the dignity of having local education and probably contribute to an improved graduation rate among what is largely an Indigenous population in that immediate area.
That’s one of the many current management challenges that the Sooke School District 62 (SD62) board heard at their lengthy February 28 board meeting (which went well beyond three hours, past 10 pm).
Today SD62 Chair Ravi Parmar has pitched in social media that “building new schools from K-12 in #PortRenfrew remains a top priority for @SD62_Sooke”. As we continue advocating for a K-5 school funded by BC. We are pleased to support the Pacheedaht Nation as they make the case for a 6-12 school.”
Large school district:
Geographically speaking, SD62 is an abnormally large school district that is mandated to deliver public education in Colwood, Highlands, Langford, Metchosin, Sooke, East Sooke, Otter Point and all the way up to Port Renfrew; there are 27 SD62 schools which are located in Colwood, Langford and Sooke.
Bus transportation has been onerous on the SD62 budget for years. (As a side note, it might make sense for Port Renfrew area to be included in SD79 Cowichan Valley School District.) For the past three years or so there’s been an ‘safety fee’ (aka administration fee) and a late registration fee as a way for SD62 to claw in more revenues.
School districts are not mandated to provide bus transportation, but for rural school districts and sprawling districts like SD62 it’s something of a foregone conclusion that it needs to be provided.
Meanwhile, in the past couple of years, SD62 has been encouraging families in denser urban areas to have their kids ‘ride, walk or roll‘ to school, as a way to begin pulling back on bussing overhead. A bus driver shortage has been a challenge since even before but especially during the pandemic, though SD62 hiring fairs in the past four or five months have been finding new recruits.
Capital funding wish list:
There are many schools on the SD62 wish list for capital funding, including the long-awaited elementary school in the Sunriver area of Sooke (on the list since about 2008), and the construction of schools for which there is already land that has been purchased (for an elementary school on Leigh Road in Langford, another high school in Langford on McCallum Road, and others).
The latest new SD62 school (currently under construction for opening in September 2025) is an elementary school in the south Langford area. The school-naming process is currently underway, with a decision likely coming this month.
Operations tight on 10%:
This past week Island Social Trends participated in the ‘media lockup’ as part of reporting on the provincial government’s Budget 2023. Funding for education is always a squeeze. It was indicated that the Ministry presently takes satisfaction in covering the ‘wage lift’ (salaries of teachers and other staff), and that the remaining 10% in most school district budgets is ample for operations (considered to be creating a “surplus” in most school districts).
In a fast-growing school district like SD62 the 10% operational budget is tight. There are additional costs to rapid growth, including the hiring overload, shuffling kids and catchment areas to accommodate bulges in the population shifts, coming up with new technology to support classrooms, buying or relocating and setting up portable classrooms, and hiring more administrative staff to keep it all organized.
Near-breaking population growth:
SD62 is expecting 5.3% growth in their student population for Fall 2023. That’s at a “near breaking” level, according to SD62 Associate Superintendent Paul Block at the February 28 board meeting, who continues to seem a bit perplexed at the lower-than-usual Kindergarten registration numbers for 2023-2024. [Note: The BC government is predicting net zero natural population growth by 2030, i.e. people in BC aren’t having enough babies to keep up with the death rate at the elderly end of the spectrum, even as the population overall is top-heavy with elderly baby-boomers.]
Block explained to the new board (the election was just in October 2022 and most of the five new SD62 trustees are still getting up to speed on their broader understanding of things, including that four of them are brand new to elected politics), as he’s done many times over the last few years, that after the BC Ministry of Education and Child Care‘s September 30 annual student enrolment count funding date that incoming students are ‘unfunded’ for the remainder of that academic year. This year so far there are 69 more K-12 students than SD62 has been funded for through the Ministry’s per-pupil funding formula.
Also having to handle about 80 English Language Learners (ELL) students this year has added to the complexity and costs of operations in SD62, explained Block.
All of this compounds the ‘budget pressures’ that SD62 Secretary-Treasurer Harold Cull has referred to in budget presentations for nearly a decade.
Housing boom driven by regional growth strategy:
The housing growth boom in Langford has in particular (followed over the years by Colwood and Sooke) exacerbated the delivery of public education by casting an operational shadow of strain over the fundamentals of delivering education.
The west shore region has been seen as ‘affordable’ which has driven thousands of new residents to Langford, Colwood and Sooke over the past 10 years. This has resulted from the strategy to push housing growth out to beyond the Victoria/OakBay/Saanich core was a Capital Regional District (CRD) idea as borne through the CRD Regional Growth Strategy over the years.
There have certainly been benefits to the construction and development sectors, and was driven with good intention, but the weight of it all has fallen mostly on the delivery of public education and the many short, mid-range and long-term impacts on families. More deeply behind all this is a housing investment and banking sector that drove homeownership in ways that left rental opportunities behind and along with that, affordability.
The challenges in SD62 around population growth is no reflection on the leadership or teachers of SD62, who work valiantly to grapple with this relatively unique and challenging public education scenario.
Cooperation with municipalities (as to getting information about expected population growth) has had its ups and downs. Under the current SD62 Superintendent Scott Stinson there has been some governance progress through the orchestration of Memorandum of Understanding arrangements with the City of Langford, City of Colwood, and District of Sooke.
Follow the Island Social Trends SD62 News Archive for ongoing SD62 news … something we’ve been done up-close (every board and committee meeting) since 2014.
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Island Social Trends SD62 News Archive (2014 to present)