Stawamus Elementary School is the odd school out.
While the rest of Squamish’s public schools are bursting at the seams, forcing the school district to address how to make enough room for the bubble of kids about to move through the system, Stawamus is facing a crisis of declining enrolment.
It is like the tale of two Squamishes – or at least the tale of two Squamish school problems.
There are six public elementary schools in Squamish, plus middle school Don Ross Secondary and high school Howe Sound Secondary.
In most elementary schools, the number of kids who are coming in are two to three times higher than the kids leaving, according to Sea to Sky superintendent of schools Lisa McCullough.
While it is clear there is an issue with classroom space for all the children entering, McCullough said it is hard to predict when those Squamish schools will be at capacity and unable to accommodate the kids coming in.
To address the crunch, the school district’s facilities department will be working with a demographer to confirm the numbers, by location, of students the school district predicts will be entering Squamish schools in the next few years.
“So we look at birthrates, we look at children who have arrived and registered, they count the children, they have research to support predictions into the future,” McCullough said.
After that, an enrolment chart will be created by the school district to compare with the space that is available.
“We know we have an issue, we have to figure out the gravity of it and the kind of timeline to remedy it. We don’t know if we are a year away before we are at capacity or three years away,” McCullough said.
Meanwhile, it is a very different situation at Stawamus. The capacity for the aging school built in 1957 is 195 and it currently has a total of 76 students, and only five enrolled in kindergarten this past September.
“The demographics are dwindling quickly… because there are very few school-age children over there,” McCullough said.
It costs about $300,000 a year to keep Stawamus operating, she said.
Logic would say that the kids in the bursting schools could go to the more empty school, but in this case students couldn’t be moved to Stawamus because they live closer to Squamish Elementary or Valleycliffe Elementary, McCullough added.
“It is very tricky,” she said.
School trustee Rick Price told The Squamish Chief that the board will look at every possible solution, including configuring Stawamus differently grade-wise, changing boundaries, repurposing the existing building through community partnerships and shared usage, or closing the school.
“We don’t frame the problem – though other people do – as closing Stawamus Elementary School, we frame the problem as a problem of a steadily dropping population at Stawamus Elementary School.”
“Closing the school is the most dramatic response to that problem and probably the least desirable,” he said.
Alice Guss (Tsawaysia Spukwus), who lost her bid for a school trustee position in the recent municipal election, went to Stawamus, as did her son.
“I love that school. It is so community minded,” said Guss, who has been involved in education for 20 years, including as a director of education and as a parent.
“It is small but it is community-minded — it is family,” she said of Stawamus.
Guss said talk of the possible closing of the school has long created a cloud hanging over it.
“My son was in that school in the ’80s and we were all worried,” she said.
Guss herself attended the school in the late 1960s.
“I would like to see the whole picture,” she said. “I think the bottom line is how much money is going into the building, because every school has to pay hydro, has to pay heating costs,” she said.
“If there is a will, there is a way.”
She said if the school has to be closed, she hopes the building is converted to something that would help the community such as a trades school.
The board of education will consider the situation with enrolments in Squamish schools some time this winter and then there will be community consultation. Some decisions will likely be made in the spring, McCullough said.
Please vote on the poll regarding this topic on the SquamishChief.com homepage http://www.squamishchief.com/: What should be done about declining enrolment at Stawamus Elementary?
