Surrey has not done a good job of ensuring its infrastructure keeps pace with its rapid growth.

The pace of growth—about 1,000 new residents per month for the past 20 years—has helped Surrey build a bigger tax base, create jobs at home, and generally assume its rightful place as the urban centre south of the Fraser River.

But in terms of services for its citizens, Surrey continues to fall further behind.

Pick your indicia.

Surrey continues to have only one full-service hospital despite trailing Vancouver in population by just slightly more than 100,000 people.

Long-term plans by TransLink for the next 30 years in Metro Vancouver show only six frequent bus routes in Surrey, with more than 30 for Vancouver.

But perhaps nowhere is the infrastructure deficit felt more than in education.

Surrey has been the province’s largest school district for many years now, but no capital funding for a single new school has been approved since 2005.

With the beginning of this school year, the number of portable classrooms in the district is 257 and is forecast to climb to 316 by next year. In human terms, this means more than one child in eight is learning in a classroom that wasn’t designed for education.

These portables aren’t cheap; each costs approximately $100,000. And to make matters worse, they are funded out of the district’s operating budget which is intended to pay for resources in the classroom, meaning classroom education is cut back even further to make up for the lack of schools.

And when schools are too small to house their total student population and have to rely on portables, there is inevitably not enough space for the rest of the educational experience: not enough playing fields, gymnasium, or assembly space; not enough lockers; not enough space for cooking, music, art, or trades classes. The list goes on.

The provincial government’s under-funding of the public education system is surely at the heart of this crisis, as is a funding formula that builds schools based on the current number of school students, as opposed to future population projections.

But more can be done by Surrey council to ensure that where and when growth happens, Surrey’s residents can rest assured that the quality of education their children will receive will remain the same over time.

For example, when Surrey Civic Coalition councillor Bob Bose was mayor in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the city council and school board worked together to solve the lack of neighbourhood schools throughout the city.

Bose insisted no building permits would be issued for new residential housing until the provincial government had committed to funding, and planning, for a school in the corresponding neighbourhood. The local decision-makers of the time realized that where you built single-family homes, you would have babies and, inevitably, many school children.

As a result, developers joined the voices lobbying the provincial government to build more neighbourhood schools throughout Surrey. Schools were built and Surrey’s severe portable crisis was allayed for a time.

While Surrey’s current reliance on portables is very bad, it is not impossible to solve.

It will be up to council and the board of education to show some leadership on this issue. They will need to roll up their sleeves and start to work together.

Working together with the school district has not been a top priority for Surrey’s current mayor and council. Mayor Dianne Watts’s Surrey First party did not bother to run school trustee candidates in the 2008 election.

Surrey needs to acquire capital funding immediately to build the many new elementary and secondary schools that are needed now, and to begin to reduce its reliance on portables.

And we need a plan that ensures that as Surrey continues to grow—which it will—capital funding will be in place on a continuing basis so that the situation does not deteriorate to this level ever again.

Stephanie Ryan is the president of the Surrey Civic Coalition.