Want to see a parent's claws come out? Tell them their kid has to go to another school.
That's precisely the can of worms the Sea to Sky School District has been forced to open this week while addressing current and future enrolment problems in Squamish elementary schools.
The school board has heard from parents twice this week in a valuable public exercise, and written comments are still being taken until the end of September.
However parents may have some homework to do this summer and give some thought to where they want their kids to attend school, and the reasons why they want them in one school or wouldn't want them in another.
The challenges are many: the school board currently has one school - Valleycliffe - right at its operating capacity and another - Mamquam - well over, while the other four are underpopulated.The worst case scenario is Stawamus, which is more than half empty.
Enrolment in Squamish has been in decline for the last 10 years, but that trend is expected reverse over the next eight years. Mamquam, Valleycliffe and Brackendale are all projected to be well beyond capacity by 2017, but the remaining elementary schools' rise in enrolment will still leave them underpopulated.
The school board's proposals to fix this are many and creative, but they all come down to the same thorny issue: telling parents their kids have to change current schools and/or go to different schools than older siblings.
And as Monday's sometimes-stormy meeting at Don Ross Secondary showed, that's going to be a real challenge.
Students and families who are forced to uproot and start fresh are not going to be pleased, and parents are going to fight to keep it from happening.
The optimal solution for Mamquam, it seems, is to move the French immersion program to schools with the capacity to handle it.
Ideally, it would go to one location as opposed to two, to avoid diluting a very strong program, which would mean Garibaldi Highlands. Mamquam would lose the cachet of its immersion program, but gain much-needed breathing room.
But the Valleycliffe/Stawamus issue is not so simple.
With one school right at its limits and the other half-empty, and no extra programs like immersion to shuffle, there are difficult choices to be made - be it making one school Kindergarten to Grade 3 and one school Grade 4 to 7, changing the catchment areas to force more Valleycliffe students to go to Stawamus, or even closing Stawamus and making Valleycliffe even bigger.
Any of these options will upset some students and anger some parents. The only question is which schools' kids and parents -Stawamus, Valleycliffe or both?
As we learned sometimes in school, there are some questions that don't have any easy answers.
-Tim Shoults
