A Vancouver education trustee suggests that the provincial government is playing a game with school districts.

Fraser Ballantyne was referring to an April 12, 2019 letter to school districts by Education Minister Rob Fleming regarding long-range facilities plans or LRFPs.

According to Fleming, the current B.C. NDP government is “focused on building and expanding schools”.

“In contrast, the previous government used the LRFP to overemphasize ‘capacity utilization’ as a means  to force mass school closures,” wrote Fleming, denoting the past B.C. Liberal administration.

Moreover, Fleming told school districts that the Ministry of Education will “no longer need to approve a school district’s LRFP”.

Vancouver is currently in the process of putting together a new LRFP.

According to the draft LRFP, the district has a current surplus capacity of 10,132 student seats.

The surplus capacity is projected to increase to over 12,000 seats in 2027.

Ballantyne, who is a former teacher and school administrator, suggests that with the province taking its hand out of the LRFP process, it will leave education districts with all the blame regarding possible school closures.

‘They’re just shifting the blame, you know, around any closures and whatnot,” Ballantyne told the Georgia Straight in a phone interview Wednesday (April 17).

District staff will provide trustees a preliminary analysis on the province’s revised LRFP guidelines at a meeting tonight of the school board’s facilities planning committee.

“We’re going to do a plan, and it’s going to be all around the effective and efficient use of our properties and lands and enrolment, and it’s going to be an interesting meeting tonight,” Ballantyne said.

The draft LRFP identifies potential strategies for Vancouver to “reduce surplus capacity”.

One is through “school consolidation” in which the “number of schools in an area of the district with low enrolment is reduced through the closure process”.

Another is “annex consolidation”, which is a “process whereby an annex is closed” while the “associated elementary school in the catchment remains open”.

A third option is the relocation of some programs to “stand-alone facilities” in “sites sufficient capacity to accommodate them”.