New Schools

What is happening with school capital funding in Kamloops? How does Kamloops compare to the rest of BC? What to do about it?

I remember seeing portables for the first time when I moved to Kamloops from the lower mainland in 2019. It was so strange to see. While everyone has an intuitive understanding that capital funding has not kept pace with enrolment growth in sd73, a couple clarifying points are in order:

• This problem has been here for a long time now. Portables were regularly used before I moved here in 2019.

• The main stress is on south-west Kamloops, especially the downtown core area. Juniper is also another area of concern. Evidently, these are high concentration areas for portables.

• This puts undue pressure on surrounding schools and the budget as it tries to accommodate capital funding defects; even if you are not residing in south-west Kamloops, this is affecting you. Finding the available real estate in the downtown area is also very challenging.

• The growth in SD73 has been moderately high, comparable to sd23 (Kelowna) and sd36 (Surrey) as a percentage. It receives far less media coverage than both those districts, perhaps because it is smaller. Its growth has not been as high as sd35 (Langley) and SD32 (Sooke).

• The relative number of seats added to Kamloops has been similar to other school districts except for Surrey. Although Surrey has faced tremendous growth as well, it is projected to add more seats than it has grown by since 2014/2015. SD73 along with many other school districts had shortages all the way back in 2014/2015 that have only increased. I will refrain from guessing why that is, but it is fair to ask for more transparency in how these decisions are made.

• The province bases its capital funding on projections for enrolment growth, which can be found online. These projections will be wrong because it is uniquely difficult to project enrolment in BC because of its very low fertility-rate and variable immigration. Most of the growth in school districts like Kamloops has been due to intra-provincial migration as people move due to affordability. Kamloops economic growth is also strongly tied to its surrounding resource sector; it is still a blue-collar town. Both these factors will hamper any decline in enrolment that will be seen in other school districts.

My recommendations:

• Prioritize capital funding in south-west Kamloops.

• Ask for more transparency in capital funding decisions.

• Keep a close eye on enrolment projections

*I use slightly different numbers than the school boards for validity of comparison between the different school districts. My numbers use head counts from the Ministry of Education while the school board uses full-time enrolment, which is more representative of the funding they will receive.