Editor: News announcing the construction of new schools is exciting. It means the beginning of a community, and a promise of a secure and stable place to learn.
When R.C. Garnett Demonstration Elementary School opened in Willoughby in 2005, families expected this same promise. Now, several years later, our school is (and has been for five years) severely overcrowded. A school built for 350 children holds nearly 560. We have nine portables, a strained infrastructure, and alternating playground days for children because there simply is not enough room.
In 2008, the Langley School District recommended to R.C. Garnett parents that the only way to alleviate this overcrowding would be for the community to rally together and lobby for a new school that could take some of the pressure off our strained facilities, and provide a school for all children who lived in the catchment.
The R.C. Garnett community did just that. A letter writing campaign was launched. Media were engaged. And I met with the minister of education, expressing how dire the need was for another school in this area. Our parents met countless times with Langley School District staff and elected officials and were led to believe that we all were working together to craft a solution.
Over these past few years, our R.C. Garnett community has been through a lot. Our parents raised nearly $50,000 for a playground. Parents have donated $40,000 to supply library books and classroom materials to meet the needs of the extra 200 children in our school. We buy sports equipment for the children to use when it is not their day on the playground. We have rallied together to make it work until the solution we had been promised would come to fruition.
Last week in the news, another new elementary school was announced to the tune of $19 million. It will be located in Southeast Yorkson — a neighbourhood that has not yet been developed. It is in close proximity to Willoughby Elementary and the only partly-full Lynn Fripps Elementary, set to open in September.
And R.C. Garnett? The solution that our school community has been provided is this: The school district is displacing children in Grades 6 and 7 from R.C. Garnett to the new Lynn Fripps school, two catchments away, and we still have nine portables.
Our infrastructure is still strained. Children still alternate days on the playground. There still aren’t enough books for the children. And new development is still coming.
News announcing the construction of new schools is exciting. At R.C. Garnett, we had hoped that the news had meant the promise of a secure and stable place to learn.
Lorraine Baldwin,
PAC co-president,
R.C. Garnett Demonstration Elementary