Chilliwack School District struggling to operate at 111% capacity

Melissa Cormier arrives at least 20 minutes before school is out to pick up her 9-year-old daughter, Tehanna. The line up to pick up her child at Unsworth Elementary School in Chilliwack, B.C., wraps around several blocks. 

While Cormier finds the traffic jam annoying, she's grateful that her daughter was able to get into the school at all.

Cormier moved back to her hometown in October and lives just up the road from the elementary school. But when she went to register her daughter, she was shocked to hear there was no space. 

"They said they were just full," she said. "Completely full. It didn't matter if you lived in the catchment area or not."

It took weeks of back and forth with the district to enrol her. 

Operating at 111% capacity

The Chilliwack School District says it has been a real challenge to accommodate the influx of nearly 500 new students this year. 

Gerry Slykhuis, the school district's secretary treasurer, says the district is operating at 111 per cent capacity. Slykhuis believes the problem has to do with more young families moving to the city to find affordable housing. 

"It's meant using a lot of portables. We're up to 89 portables now in our fairly small district," Slykhuis said. 

The district has also had to get creative and reconfigure some of its spaces.

"We moved Grade 6s out of our elementary schools, which really helped with the capacity at our elementary schools but put a lot of pressure on our middle and secondary schools this year," Slykhuis said. 

The district also got  $10 million from the provincial government to acquire the old University of The Fraser Valley Campus, which moved to the south side of Chilliwack a few years ago. 

The district takes possession later this month and plans to fit 700 students in that space in about two years.

"Because it was a former university, it's got classrooms in it and everything like that. So we don't have to do a whole bunch of work in order to start getting kids in there, so that's really great," he said. 

Slykhuis says finding sites suitable for schools are difficult because most of the large parcels of flat land in Chilliwack are located on the Agricultural Land Reserve, which is kept for farming purposes only.

There are plans for a new K-8 school on Tyson Road near the Vedder River. Construction begins next October and will be ready for students by 2022.

In the past two years alone, the district says it has enrolled 727 new students. Slykhuis anticipates the new spaces, which won't be available for several years, won't be enough if the trend continues. 

"The growth is so high right now that unless it tapers off it's going to be a real challenge."