Surrey School Board wants province to remove 45 portables

Elementary schools across Surrey have relied on portables to deal with student overcrowding. Now, 45 of those portables need to be removed as construction to expand some schools permanently has finished.

While the Surrey School Board says it is happy that schools now have more space to house students, they struggle to pay for the removal of those portables.

Board members are now asking the province to step in and provide that funding.

“We simply cannot afford it. Full stop,” said board chair Gary Tymoschuk.

“We will not be moving those portables off the school sites until there’s sufficient funds to allow for that.”

Tymoschuk says it is an urgent problem since the portables are taking up space that schools used to have before.

Among others, those spaces were used for playing fields for kids or parking for teachers.

The board says it would cost about $100,000 to haul away each of the portables.

This money, however, should not be paid by the school district’s operating budget — which is already strapped for cash, according to the board.

“Our board made a decision at the budget table two years ago that we were no longer going to be able to afford to pay for the relocation of the portables. And that means the removal of them from the property when we no longer need them. We just can’t afford it,” Tymoschuk explained.

The school district says there are still 350 portables in use across Surrey schools.

The portables were necessary in the first place because Surrey’s school district experienced high enrollment in recent years.

With files from Srushti Gangdev.