Today, the Vancouver School Board announced the possible closure of my old elementary school, among several others.

While I believe that school closures are not automatically terrible things – sometimes shutting a school down can lead to making a better system overall – I get the sense that the premise behind the school closure is flawed.  The question I address here is:

“Does a demographic analysis support the notion that schools should be closed?”

As we’ve heard, the province won’t fund seismic upgrades until a district has 95% utilization of its school sites.  But does this make sense?

Most in the public sphere have argued that having schools that aren’t fully utilized is a good thing – this “underutilized space” is actually used for music education, daycares, preschools, strong start centres and other important services.  This is a perfectly good argument, but I don’t have much insight to add to it.  But I do have something to add: my background as someone who did enrolment management planning for universities leads me to look at another angle: what do the demographics say about this issue?

Well, as it happens, the province has a tremendous resource on this question:

Pulling the data from the BC Stats Demographics website, which lets you look at the future school-aged population projection by school district, you can see a few things:

1. The population of school-aged children has declined from the early 2000s until 2015.
2. The population of school-aged children in BC begins rising in 2015 and continues to rise for about 20 years.
3. In the VSB, the school aged population in K-9 (the data cuts 15-19 year olds in one category, so it isn’t possible to zero in on K-12) will increase between now and 2035 by 32% – from approx 50,000 children aged 5-14 to 65,000 children aged 5-14.  You read that right: 15,000 more children to fit into schools on the 20 year time horizon.  What’s the response from the province? Close schools.

Now perhaps those predictions will prove wrong – housing affordability issues may keep that predicted growth out of Vancouver – but the point is that we are currently at the demographic low point.  Right now, we have the smallest the school-aged population since Gen X.  It is the smallest it will be until the grandchildren of Gen Xers hit the schools.  From a long-term planning perspective, this is the exact wrong moment to ‘right size’ the school district and require 95% utilization – we are right sizing to the smallest system we need on the 40-50 year population cycle.  Shutting down empty classrooms will likely lead to a predictable and avoidable explosion of portables in a decade or so.

So, my issue is not about whether there is virtue in 85% utilization vs. 95% utilization.  My issue is that when faced with a 32% growth in student population, why on earth would a government that claims it is responsible force that district to leave no more than a 5% buffer in its capacity?

See this differently?  I’d love to hear your comments below.