Dear Editor,
Re: “Board looks at schools in high-rises,” News, Jan. 13.
I don’t envy our school trustees as they plan for the future of our city’s students in these unprecedented times.
Planning schools, high-rise or not, in our city centre and trying to determine which to close is nearly an impossible task.
We need to look at historical data from outside Canada, from cities where comparable growth and redevelopment happened 20 and 30 years ago that might be able to provide us some idea of what happens when suburban areas densify.
They can provide us with models for schools in urban areas, for answers to gym space (a tough engineering task in a high-rise) and green space for playgrounds — the city and school district need to work together on both to ensure optimum use of our tax dollars.
It seems that some planning information and “guess-timates” of future school populations is available for city centre, but I wonder about the understandings of the areas being considered for possible school closures.
Sure enough, populations have been declining in several catchments, at least in part due to huge numbers of redevelopments of the residential single-family properties — when houses are bought for redevelopment, sit empty a few months, then get knocked down, rebuilt, then marketed for sale, sometimes for as long as a year. There are no students from those properties attending school.
And then, if the redeveloped properties sit empty after purchase, there are still no students.
But what about when these houses are fully occupied? In my neighbourhood, the new houses have double the number of bedrooms of the ones they replace.
Isn’t it reasonable to expect that twice as many students will be knocking on school doors once they are fully occupied?
And maybe it will be more — in major cities all over the world, large homes originally built for wealthy families are now subdivided into apartments. That’s what happens when real estate prices rise.
As they look at options for high-rise schools, our trustees should also look at land use patterns and school attendance in former single-family neighbourhoods.
We need research from cities in Europe and perhaps a few U.S. cities to make good decisions.
Simply looking at declining enrolment over the past few years will not lead to good decision-making.
Julie Halfnights
Richmond
