South Surrey Schools Are Running Out of Space. The Province Has Known for Years.

Enrolment projections showed this was coming. Capital funding requests were filed. New school construction was promised. The schools are still full and the portables are still multiplying.

The Surrey School District has been flagging South Surrey's enrolment crisis through the appropriate channels for years. Capital funding requests have been submitted to the Ministry of Education. The data showing projected growth and the resulting facility gap has been presented in board meetings, in correspondence with ministry officials, and in public budget documents.

The response has been inadequate. New school construction in South Surrey has not kept pace with the growth that was forecast and has materialized exactly as forecast. The result is school populations that routinely exceed designed capacity, served by portable classrooms that were supposed to be bridge measures and have become permanent fixtures.

At one South Surrey elementary school, eleven portables now occupy what was the school's field. Children at that school have never experienced a full field day on their own school grounds. The concept of a school field — the place where generations of children ran and played at recess — is, for them, a parking lot for temporary buildings.

The Ministry of Education funds capital projects through a process that is slow by design, conservative in its approvals, and consistently behind the growth curve in the fastest-growing districts. Surrey has been one of those districts for two decades. The ministry has had two decades to adapt its process. It has not.

What South Surrey's families need is not a commitment to review the capital plan. They need a commitment to a specific school, on a specific site, with a specific construction start date, that will relieve the pressure on the most overcrowded facilities in the region. They need it before another cohort of children goes through their entire elementary education in a portable.

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