New schools coming to Metro Vancouver, as premier acknowledges more needed

New Westminster and Langley got visits from B.C. Premier David Eby Thursday as the province committed to building new schools in both places.

Premier David Eby announced Thursday that two new schools are coming to Langley Township, creating 2,800 new spaces on a single campus that will house a middle school and a high school.

The schools, which are expected to open in 2027, are being touted as an example of how to speed up construction to try to keep pace with a growing population.

“We’ve been encouraging school boards to do things like pre-fabricated additions that can be built in half the time and at a significant reduction in cost, to look at the possibility of multiple-school sites and find other efficiencies,” Eby said.

Still, the premier acknowledged there is more work to be done to meet the need in the province.

“It’s hard to stand in front of a site with 2,800 student spaces and say more schools are needed, but that’s absolutely the case,” he said.

The announcement in Langley Township came on the heels of an announcement in New Westminster, which Eby said is also a “fast-growing city” where there are “huge volumes of new people” moving in as it rapidly densifies.

Parents like Melanie Cheng, with the Vancouver District Parents Advisory Council, say they would like to see a situation where the province is not in a position of having to play catch-up as populations grow.

“I think what parents need to see is certainty. We need to ensure that when housing developments are approved that we also see corresponding co-ordinated planning for complete communities,” she said.

Eby noted his government has spent $6.6 billion on schools. But despite tens of thousands of new spaces for students, there are still kids who aren’t learning in actual classrooms.

“It’s an astonishing thing, but having funded and being in the process of delivering almost 50,000 additional student spaces, I know that we still have portables in the province,” he said.

“That we still need to do more really illustrates the scope of the population growth challenge that we face. A portable is not the appropriate location for a kid to learn. We need kids to be in properly built, climate-controlled, modern schools and that are seismically safe in every corner of the province. And that is our goal.”