The corner of Fourth St. and 11th Ave. S.E. might be the most ironic intersection in Calgary. On this block, three high-rise condominium towers are being erected, and the project area is a no man’s land of rubble, earth-movers, and construction equipment. In the middle of all the debris stands the historic Victoria Community School. Right now, the three-storey, 95-year-old brick and sandstone building sits empty, but soon it will be converted to office space for a communications company.
The irony is this: By 2009, the three chic glass skyscrapers being erected will create more than 100 floors of new residential space directly adjacent to the school, primarily occupied by young professionals in or approaching their prime child-rearing years.
This raises an obvious question: why is this school not a school anymore? Because the junior high program was closed in 1989, and the elementary program shut its doors in 1995. At the time, the downtown condo boom was years away, both programs suffered from low enrolment, and their students could easily be accommodated at nearby schools. It was simple economics. Victoria Park wasn’t worth the money anymore.
Instead, the school boards spent their limited cash in the burbs, where nearly all new families in the city lived (as they continue to, but more on that later.) A glance at the public and Catholic boards’ 2007-2010 capital plans, a document that all Alberta school boards draw up every three years to outline their expected growth, finds almost all of its funds being spent on the edge of town. The Calgary Board of Education (CBE) Capital Plan outlines the construction of 17 new schools over the next three years on the city’s fringes, as far out as Airdrie and Cranston. The Calgary Catholic School District (CCSD) has 11 new suburban schools in its plan. They’re mostly mega-schools — only one of the schools, set to open next year, will have a capacity of fewer than 900.
The inner city housing boom of the last few years has some Calgarians wondering if the boards aren’t falling behind the times. Ward 8 Ald. John Mar, whose purview includes the Beltline and other inner-city neighbourhoods, sees some serious tunnel vision in the current approach to school funding and development vis-à-vis the inner city.
“The idea is that there are no children there, so they’ll never come back,” he says. “But they will, and we’re not even close [to having enough classroom space]. If you look at the Beltline as a whole, it’s the youngest population in the city. So what do you think is going to happen when these 27- to 40-year-olds have kids? It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that Connaught School, say, will become a vibrant school. Let’s not dispose of this… let’s plan for the revitalization of it now.”
Rather than revitalization, the opposite seems to be occurring. Connaught School, on 13th Ave., and Ninth St., was considered for closure in 2003, and today it clings precariously to a student population well below capacity. In just the past few years, to say nothing of years previous, the city has witnessed a rash of closures and charter conversions in the inner city (charter schools being specialty schools that offer education in arts, sports, science, etc., but which don’t function as neighbourhood schools). These include King Edward School in Richmond, Knob Hill School in Bankview, Jerry Potts Elementary in Varsity, Glenmeadows School in Glendale, Colonel Sanders Elementary in Thorncliffe, Renfrew Elementary School and Balmoral School in Tuxedo Park.
However, it’s in the Beltline, where population growth is greatest, that school space is tightest. With only four schools — Western Canada High School, St. Mary’s High School, St. Monica School and Connaught Elementary, the neighbourhood has extremely limited room for students.
And city hall has big plans for the neighbourhood (which comprises the communities of Connaught and Victoria Park). Last year, the area’s net population increase was well over 1,000, and the city is proposing to increase the population to as much as 35,000 by 2035 and ultimately to 55,000 from its current 17,000 residents. (And even this seems low, given that the city’s much ballyhooed 100 Year Vision for Midtown, focusing on a smaller portion of the neighbourhood, aims to increase the area’s population from the current 2,400 to more than 37,000.) Yet neither 2005’s otherwise laudable Beltline Redevelopment Plan nor the more recent 100 Year Vision make any mention of schools at all.
And the boards continue to ignore the city’s urban core. “Look, we base a lot on the Calgary city census done every year, and the net migration that comes into the city,” says CBE spokesperson Phil Carlton. “We can also tell you that this is the first year that the inner city grew by 1,000 persons, and not one school-age child.”
Mar’s numbers are disputable, but even if they’re correct, they could indicate a sea change. Yet the city keeps its nose out of schools altogether. One planning department spokesperson, (who wished not to go on record), when asked if the boards work with the city, could only offer, “They do and they don’t,” before admitting that “We don’t have any real say over that. And we certainly don’t develop policy that maintains [community schools].”
A further problem, say Mar and other critics, is that the two bodies that are responsible for building and funding schools — the school boards and the province — can’t, or won’t, talk to one another.
“There needs to be better communication and interface between the governing bodies,” Mar says. ”The province has to be at the table, has to be much more connected with the CBE and the separate schools, and be cognizant of what’s happening in the revitalization areas. If we want to have smart growth, it’s dependent on having amenities like schools close to where people and development exist.”
A LACK OF CO-ORDINATION
If Calgarians want a glimpse into the future, we need only look to the west. In Vancouver, the downtown condo market took off long before ours — in the ’90s, derelict swaths of that city’s downtown peninsula were transformed into fashionable neighbourhoods, colonized for the most part by the same young professional types nowadays being lured to Calgary’s inner city. And it wasn’t long before the city’s older schools, long considered expendable, were in high demand.
So in 2004, the Vancouver Board of Education (VBE) opened the first new downtown school seen in Vancouver school since 1975. Elsie Roy Elementary was opened as a small (280 capacity) school in downtown’s trendy Yaletown neighbourhood, and it was so badly needed that by 2006, it was already stuffed to capacity, with parents clamouring for spaces — as they have ever since. This past January 6, some parents even resorted to camping out overnight in hopes of being first in line the next morning to sign their kids up for fall kindergarten classes.
“It’s been known for many, many years that there was going to be a huge neighbourhood here,” one Yaletown parent, Ian McLeod, told a CBC reporter that night. “Thousands of people, thousands of condos, two- and three-bedroom condominiums. You can’t tell me they didn’t know that was going to happen.”
However, as VBE chairman Clarence Hansen told the same reporter, “I didn’t realize we were in that situation.” (The board has since blamed the B.C. government for downsizing the scale of the school when it was first built.)
In other words — and to simplify a little — Vancouver’s new generation of downtown dwellers came for the art galleries and the trendy bars, but eventually, they needed their neighbourhoods to offer the kinds of amenities required once the party years are over.
“You can’t have densification if it’s a stop-off point for people for four or five years of their life,” says Rachel Notley, the NDP MLA for Edmonton-Strathcona. Notley has recently become an outspoken advocate for smaller, more intimate schools and classes, as well as community sustainability.
“Again, it goes back to this [lack of communication],” she says. “The city and province don’t talk to or ask for any co-ordination with the school board. They’re working completely at odds with each other. The approach is that the city does planning, and the province does funding, and the boards make decisions on what schools stay open and which close. They don’t consider, how does one thing impact on another in terms of planning, in terms of child care, in terms of the environment.”
School boards, of course, aren’t in the business of urban revitalization. They just want to get the schools to where the students are. They don’t anticipate growth, they chase it.
But the question isn’t (yet) why are new inner city schools not being opened? It’s why are old ones still being closed, even in the face of changing demographics?
“Right now, there’s still the tendency to perhaps live downtown for awhile,” says Alberta Education spokesperson Kathy Telfer, “but still to purchase the bigger home with the bigger lot in the suburbs. That’s still where families are locating.”
Telfer makes a passing reference to a new project on the part of the province to study demographics and fertility rates, and allocate resources appropriately. The project is in its nascent stages, is as yet unnamed and hasn’t produced any numbers.
Meanwhile, in the outer inner-city
Katryna Sigurdson’s seven-year-old daughter attends Windsor Park Elementary, a small community school north of Chinook Centre. The CBE has been talking closure since last year, and Sigurdson and other parents have been campaigning to keep the school open for months, to no avail. With an enrolment of only 66 students, CBE trustees elected this March to close it and move the students to nearby Elboya School. Sigurdson understands the logistics behind the decision (declining enrolment, primarily), but questions the board’s prescience, pointing out that the empty land at 50th Ave. and 4A St., four blocks north of the school, may become a large condo complex. (Plans for a 452-unit condo building were recently nixed, but the land’s current owner, Altalink, is in talks with the community association about selling the land to a residential developer.)
“In June [2007] we were invited to the beginning of the community engagement process,” says Sigurdson, referring to the series of community consultations the board has to engage in before making a final decision to close a school. “One lady spoke up and said she’d moved into the area the day before because of the school, and another family had moved in a month before, also because of the school. And now they have to take their kids out and put them into a different school.”
Sigurdson isn’t thinking about long-term urban sustainability any more than the boards are, of course. Nor are most parents. They like neighbourhood schools for more tangible, immediate reasons: the scale, the intimacy, the sense of neighbourhood togetherness they foster.
“I grew up in this neighbourhood, about three kilometres from where we live now,” says Assunta Osweiler of her northeast Mayland Heights neighbourhood. Her son Sam is enrolled at St. Clement Elementary, the same neighbourhood school she went to years ago. The school will not open next school year, with students heading to nearby St. Alphonsus Elementary. “I liked St. Clement because it’s so small. The Grade 6 students know who the Grade 1 students are. They know my son, they all watch out for each other and respect each other, and it feels like a family.”
The sentiment is echoed by Notley. “For every study that tells you it’s in kids’ best interests to send them to one of these schools with 1,000 or 1,500 students, where they can take advantage of all these programs that they theoretically offer, there’s another study that will tell you that going to a smaller school with more community interaction and connection is just as important,” she says. “The board’s doing this big thing, we’ve created this huge school, and we’ll have every program under the sun, but I don’t believe it’s that black-and-white. You lose a lot… [small schools] bring parents together in the task of doing one of the most important things they do in their lives, which is to raise their families. And it’s not just a social hub, but also a community development hub.”
The difficulty in Windsor Park and St. Clement is that the boards seem to be making the only logical decision they can under the current planning paradigm. Not only is enrolment at both schools decreasing, but Windsor Park’s overall population decreased as well in 2007, as did many surrounding communities. Since provincial funding is based on a per-student basis, Windsor Park’s student population was only enough to garner it 2.5 teachers (ensuring that multiple grades ended up in the same class.)
“We’ve just finished an engagement process with Windsor Park community,” says the CBE’s Carlton. “Their population was 66 students this year, in a building that could house 225. And their projection for next year was 50. So we engaged the community in a conversation to address the alternatives up to and considering a recommendation for closure… In Windsor Park, [the trustees] determined that it was prudent.”
St. Clement is something of a different story — the neighbourhood has a more stable population, but the enrolment has still dropped by exactly half since 1997. “We have 87 students enrolled this year, and we have a capacity of 300,” says Osweiler. “I understand the financial aspects of it all and where they’re coming from… but our campaign has been that they didn’t give us enough notice. When my son enrolled in kindergarten, I said, ‘Geez, this is a small school, is there any need for worry?’ And they said no, because at the time they were introducing an Italian program, and they said the school board wouldn’t invest money into a new program if it were slated for closure…. When the trustees came to visit the school for a community meeting, one parent asked what happens if St. Clement gets transferred, and then a year down the road St. Angela [another nearby school with low enrolment] gets transferred. That puts St. Alphonsus into an overcapacity situation. And they said, ‘We’re not going to worry about that. If we need to, we’ll put portables in.’ So it’s like, ‘why bother?’”
Even Alberta’s newly appointed education minister, Dave Hancock, recently took his own government to task over what he sees as a cumbersome funding process — though school boards draw up their capital plans, the province has an entirely separate plan, and it’s the province that ultimately decides which new schools get cash. Collaboration between the two to determine priorities simply doesn’t seem to exist. While Hancock’s objection doesn’t have anything to do with keeping small schools viable or adapting to changing demographics, at least he seems to advocate collaboration between the different levels of government.
Ald. Mar, again, is far more blunt in his appraisal of the situation — but he’s also hopeful, and his hope is inspired by a real-life, local inner-city school success story. “In my own community is Sunalta School, a fantastic little school…. It’s one of the shining examples of diversity, about 40 per cent of the school is immigrant…. It’s an inner-city school that was slated for closure in the ’80s, but lo and behold, more people with young families moved into the area. Had we closed it down, we would have lost yet another inner-city school and we would have not had the opportunity for this revitalization. I walk my kids to Sunalta, and it’s the same school I went to as a kid. What does that tell you about revitalization? The kids grow up and leave, but sooner or later they come back.”
And, he adds, “We’re not ready for them.”
