Number drop
Enrolment at Vancouver public schools appears to be down 291 students more than expected. The school board had anticipated a drop of 500 students but preliminary numbers reveal 791 fewer students in classrooms.
The board's management coordinating committee received a verbal update on the numbers Oct. 9. School board chair Patti Bacchus said the biggest drops appear to be in grades 4 to 7 and 10 to 12.
Bacchus doesn't expect the decline to affect school funding or prompt layoffs because she says the Ministry of Education provides funding protection for districts that lose more than one per cent of their students. The Vancouver school board serves 54,000 elementary and secondary pupils.
Bacchus said associate superintendent Scott Robinson is working on a proposal to track students who leave the public system.
"For example, if they're leaving school in Grade 10 or Grade 11 or 12, my concern is they may just be not at school," she said. "Are we following up on that and making sure they have access to an educational program?"
Some principals know where their former students have gone but that information isn't reported to the board in a usable form.
"Every time we lose a student we do lose funding," Bacchus said.
Bacchus hopes the board can gain access to ministry information that includes the personal student number the province assigns for each pupil, which follows students from public to independent schools.
Peter Froese, executive director of the Federation of Independent Schools Association of B.C., said so far enrolment in private schools across the province appears to have increased this year.
Typical growth is less than one per cent, he said, but this year, enrolment appears to have risen an average of more than three per cent in 150 schools, or about half of the independent schools the association represents and has heard from across the province.
"In some cases people have said it's because of the job action," Froese said, adding parents identified the lack of reporting to parents and suspension of extracurricular activities for students during teachers' job action last year as frustrations that motivated them to enrol their children in independent schools.
In Vancouver, religious schools, particularly those that are Catholic, are often already full, Froese noted, so there typically isn't a direct correlation between enrolment dropping in public schools and rising in independent schools. "We've all been really holding our breath a bit this year because of job action," Bacchus conceded. "We know that was not a positive public relations [drive], at any rate, for the [public] school system."
But Bacchus believes parents are less likely to move their children to another institution once they're enrolled in a school.
"One of my fears was we'd see a dip in kindergarten enrolment and that didn't happen," she said.
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