West Vancouver School District Superintendent Chris Kennedy spoke to parents at Bowen Island Community School (BICS) last week about what makes the school unique, and what lies ahead now that BC teachers have won the right to negotiate class size and composition. On the last point, Kennedy said that the win means there is money to hire 17 new teachers inside the district, but the lack of housing affordability could make it challenging to find people to fill those positions.
One thing that makes BICS unique, said Kennedy, is that class size remains basically the same between kindergarten and grade 7.
“You have about 40 kids in K [kindergarten] and you have about 40 kids in grade 7, and its almost the same all the way through. And that’s unlike than any other elementary school in the district, because in the other schools its small in K and high in 7 which we see largely as economics and house-pricing,” said Kennedy who called the situation on Bowen a more “traditional” school dynamic than the rest of the district, where families move-in as their kids get older.
There are currently 335 students at BICS, and roughly 7,200 students in the whole district, said Kennedy. There are roughly 500 international students (400 of them in highschool), and 1400 students who live outside the district.
“The closer you get to Taylor way, a school like Westcott Elementary for example, has 25 -30% of students who don’t live in the school district,” said Kennedy. “’We’re reliant on that, in the school district. We would have closed five or six schools by now if we didn’t have those students. The number of young people within our school district has continued to decline, again, an economics affordability issue, but that has been backfilled by students coming from elsewhere.”
Bowen, and Lions Bay stand out as different in this regard. However, enrollment in the public school in Lions Bay (which goes until grade three) is currently half of what it was eight years ago.
BICS, he said, has benefited from having on-island principles and more on-island staff in recent years.
“Having Scott [Slater] and having Jennifer [Pardee] before I think that really helps in building a sense of community,” he said. “I’m here less. In some ways, the District doesn’t have to pay as much attention because there’s an on-island principle and you probably ask him questions in the grocery store. So, having an on-island principle and on-island staff really helps, and that hasn’t always been the case.”
He says this is another way BICS stands out within the district.
Out of the 50 million dollars awarded to BC teachers from their lawsuit with the government, Kennedy says the West Vancouver School District will get $600,000, or enough for sixteen or 17 new teachers.
“There’s been no teaching jobs forever, now we’ve got 1,100 across the province,” said Kennedy. “It makes people like me nervous because all of our teachers who can’t afford to live in our district are getting poached by the communities they live in. So every counselor, or ELL teacher of teacher-librarian that lives in North Van or Burnaby or Surrey right now is getting a phone call saying, wouldn’t you like to work where you live? Because they are in the same boat we are, trying to hire people.”
The job postings for teaching positions in the West Vancouver School District will come down at the end of this week. Kennedy says that given Bowen’s affordability in comparison to the rest of the district, it seems to be a more attractive option for teachers.
