With private school enrollment in B.C. up four per cent this year, public schools are doing their best to keep parents – and their kids – from leaving the system.
Vancouver School Board Chair Patti Bacchus said public schools need to go to new lengths in order to ensure they don’t lose students – and the government funding that comes with them.
“We are in a form of competition now. We’re funded per student so when we lose students we lose the funding. And it diminishes our ability to provide a range of programs and staffing,” she told CTV News.
The school board is now offering international baccalaureate programs. Although it’s more commonly offered in private schools, Southlands Elementary has become Vancouver’s only official primary years IB school in a bid for increasing enrollment.
“A lot of our applications come across boundaries. They’re from various parts of Vancouver and they've decided they want to seek out IB,” said Fiona Stroh.
At Windermere Secondary in East Vancouver, the Athena Arts Program, which includes a traditional Japanese arts class, is attracting students from across the region.
Laura Treloar believes the creative and unconventional arts program helps with student retention.
“Because you're able to offer a parent something that is of special interest to their child,” she said.
Some children at Sentinel Secondary in West Vancouver spend half of their day in an elite soccer academy.
“In the morning they get their full academic programming and then after that they do these programs in the afternoon so they literally can go off into areas of passion and train,” said District Principal Diane Nelson.
There are also tennis, hockey and baseball academies for interested students.
She says in a city where $20,000 per year private schools like Mulgrave are within reach for many parents, her school needed a niche to complete.
‘We are actually like a private school run in a public system,” Nelson said.
The catch is that parents pay for the extra sports academies, something families in poorer school districts can’t do.
Bacchus said the school district doesn’t discriminate based on a child’s economic background.
“We take everyone who comes to the door,” she said. “We have students who live in poverty who require significant extra supports and services. We take students with all range of special needs.”
Bacchus said that’s what makes it difficult for most public schools to offer the same expensive programs as private schools.
“We like to use the analogy of running a private hospital that screens their patients, looks at their histories, makes them take a test before they get in and you can screen out the ones that might be more challenging and expensive to treat. So the playing field is not level in that regard,” she said.
On CTV News at Six on Wednesday, reporter Shannon Paterson asks B.C.’s top universities how they view private and public school applicants and the type of student they’re actively recruiting.
