BC school districts still scrambling to create class space, hire teachers

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Schools across BC are welcoming students back to class today under new court-ordered rules around class size and composition, and Education Minister Rob Fleming says there’s still work to do on that front.

Speaking outside an East Vancouver elementary school today, Fleming says about one-third of the new class spaces are portables. In Surrey, for example, about one in every eight students is taught inside a portable classroom.

“The only way to get on top of that is to build more schools; to fix more schools,” he says.

“We have had to deploy additional portables in certain school districts because that was the only way to save on-site childcare facilities, for example.”

More hiring needs to be done as well, especially in the specialty teaching positions, “because for the better part of a decade, that was a profession that was not respected by the previous government and there were no job opportunities there,” explains Fleming.

Portables are described as a temporary measure while the government figures out a path forward.

Fleming says they’ll know more about how to proceed when final enrolment numbers come out at the end of September. A broader education strategy will be detailed in the 2018 Spring budget.

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