Dear Editor,
The school trustees do have many difficult decisions to make regarding school closures.
I was reading that Grauer elementary school, located on Blundell Road between Railway and No. 1 Road, currently has 161 students enrolled in the school.
The number of students enrolled at Grauer between 1979-1986 was bursting at the seams with more than 500 students each year.
At the time, the population of Richmond was just under 100,000.
The population today is just over 212,000.
This is a centrally located school which has the same catchment area with the same number of surrounding schools as it did in the early-mid 1980s.
In the last 10-15 years, there have been many large new houses built in the catchment neighbourhood that contain at least six or seven bedrooms.
Why has the elementary school-aged population decreased so dramatically while the population itself has risen?
Have many families found they simply cannot afford to raise a family in this neighbourhood?
Are all of the neighbourhood kids attending private school in other parts of the Lower Mainland?
Is anyone actually living in the surrounding houses?
How can the school trustees make any sound decisions when the demographic data is so vague?
What would happen should the real estate bubble burst? Will the demographics shift suddenly again?
Once schools are closed, demolished and replaced with upscale housing developments, where are the kids going to go to school?
Will there be any families with school-aged kids?
Ken Moffatt
Richmond
