Our Letters
City of Vancouver - June 21, 2019
City of Vancouver
Dear Mayor and Council
Re: Olympic Village School
We write on behalf of the Southeast False Creek community seeking your assistance to advocate for a new elementary school in Olympic Village.
The City of Vancouver’s development plan for our community dated April 2007 presented clear goals as follows:
By 2020, Southeast False Creek will be home to 12,000-16,000 people and will have six million square feet of development. This will include:
- Three to five licensed childcare facilities
- Two out-of-school care facilities
- An elementary school
As a result of this information provided by the City of Vancouver to its residents, many members of our community built their families here with the expectation that there would be a school for their children. As we near 2020, this is not even close to a reality.
The delay in delivering on this goal of an elementary school is of paramount concern for the following reasons:
1. The existing catchment school is over capacity
Simon Fraser Elementary is the existing catchment school for children in Southeast False Creek. The school is currently operating at 159% capacity and cannot accommodate any more students. For the upcoming 2019–2020 school year, Simon Fraser Elementary received 105 in-catchment applications for kindergarten; the capacity of which enables a mere 40 of the 105 applicants to be accepted. As a result, 65 children were not accepted and were placed on a waitlist, leaving little prospect of admission for many families.
School capacity has been an issue for many years at Simon Fraser and at several neighbouring elementary schools. The current solution is to place waitlisted children at other elementary schools around Vancouver where capacity exists. Currently, the children in our community attend at least 25 different elementary schools. Although some placements in other schools may be by choice, many are strictly due to the capacity problem. This has separated friends and neighbours and has fractured community networks. It has also negatively impacted the children as it has broken up friendships created from their early years, impacted their involvement in community-based extracurricular activities and created longer commutes, which puts additional strain on young children.
Unfortunately, our community is not the only Vancouver community facing this problem. It is time to ask — what families with school aged children would want to endure this situation? Some families are leaving our community as it is the only feasible option. We want to keep families in our community to ensure it remains diverse, successful and vibrant.
2. The school situation is forcing families into cars
The City of Vancouver, with the Greenest City Action Plan, strives to be the greenest city in the world and markets itself globally as the leader in sustainable development. In particular, when Olympic Village was developed by the Millennium Development Group, it was built to use innovative energy efficiency and sustainable systems, which remains intact today. Our community and in particular, Olympic Village, is one where people choose to walk or cycle and outright forego owning a vehicle. More recently, Vancouver also adopted the Climate Emergency Response, which members of our community fully support.
Simon Fraser Elementary is located at 15th Avenue and Manitoba Street, 15 blocks away from Olympic Village. The route to school passes through an industrial area with poor visibility for pedestrians and across three major thoroughfares: 2nd Avenue, Broadway and 12th Avenue. The route southbound is also uphill. This route is not realistic for young children to walk or even bike to school. In addition, there is no school bus. As a result, many parents must drive their children to school. The residents of our community, one of the greenest communities in the world, are making a negative contribution to the environment. Parents are forced to add to the already problematic traffic congestion, increase pollution and negatively impact the climate crisis. This makes it challenging to support initiatives such as Vancouver’s goal to “Make walking, cycling, and public transit preferred transportation options.”
3. The school situation is having a disproportionate impact on women
Our experience is that most of the burden of transporting children to and from school falls to the mothers. Building on the Women’s Equity Strategy goal to have accessible childcare, a complementary goal is also to ensure accessible schools. The current school and commute situation is having a disproportionately negative impact on women in our community.
While the Vancouver School Board has identified an Olympic Village school as a top priority for many years now, the Ministry of Education has not funded the project.
The school crisis in our community will worsen as residential developments continue to be built and additional families move to the neighbourhood. This will be echoed in many other Vancouver communities such as the River District, Jericho Lands and Oakridge, where densification appears to be the top priority rather than infrastructure, most importantly schools.
We are stepping up to offer our community as a test case for a Modular School. Once it serves its purpose in our community, it could be repurposed to other Vancouver communities which will share similar problems in the future.
We are asking you to support our community and help find a solution to this problem. We would be happy to welcome you to our neighbourhood so that you can have a closer look at the challenges in our growing urban community.
Please support families living in Southeast False Creek and work with the Vancouver School Board and Ministry of Education to find a solution now.
Let us not forget, the children are our future.
With respect,
Taralyn Day Monica Klimo
Lisa McAllister Fiorella Pinillos Baffigo