How to build a school

New schools don’t (usually) pop together like Lego.

Any new school building, whether it’s a new school or an addition, takes years of planning and dialogue, with emails and phone calls bouncing between the school district and the ministry of education like a dodgeball off a fourth-grader’s face. 

But while provincial funding inevitably lags years behind most Fraser Valley school district’s construction goals, new construction methods may hold some promise that new facilities will be built faster in the years to come.

Starting schools

A new school, like any big dream, starts on paper.

The provincial government funds school building across BC. At the end of every school year, School districts send their latest capital plans to Victoria . Each one pitches the projects the district wants in the next five years and provides the province with a prioritized list of additions, renovations, and new school sites. 

But plans for new schools can remain ideas in long-term facilities plans and capital plans for years—bumped around on a district’s annual priority list if they aren’t approved.

Once the province decides which projects it will fund, letters arrive in email inboxes of each district: an official yes to a specific project in a capital plan—or the official no. The purchase of school sites happen separately from the approval for the construction of a new school. (Sometimes a school district will acquire a site long before any new school is approved. School districts can buy properties on the open market or acquire them after a developer sets land aside in return for permission to build a new subdivision. School districts also occasionally tear down buildings, but hold onto a property in order to potentially build a new school in the future.) 

If the ministry’s answer to a specific school request is “yes,” the district will get to work creating concept plans, business cases, and, eventually, sketching out a funding agreement.

Each district also has a long-range facilities plan that details, among other things, which neighbourhoods are expected to need a new school, how many kids and grades that school must accommodate, and when it will be needed by.

But the district’s dreams, calculated alongside population estimates provided by local officials, don’t always get provincial funding when they need it. Dozens of districts across the province all have their own needs and requirement, and they’re all seeking money out of the same provincial pot.

In 2021, the Chilliwack School District finalized a new five-year long-term facilities plan. In the plan, district staff recommended building four new schools (three elementary and one middle school), while adding additions to at least seven other schools. 

Additions to two schools have so far been completed, with a year left of the current plan. The others still live solely on paper, in plans and documents and files.

One school (Stitó:s Lá:lém totí:lt Elementary/Middle School on Tyson Road) has been completed in that period, though plans for the school started in 2019. Already underway, plans for the school were not part of the current long-range facilities plan. 

Getting provincial approvals to build new schools tends to take more time than school districts would like. In Langley, a new elementary school in northeast Latimer has been a high priority for the Langley School District since at least 2019. It was announced last May, and construction is supposed to start this spring. The school could accommodate 555 students starting in 2025, six years after it was first identified as a priority. The district had hoped, in 2019, that construction would start in 2021.

The delays matter. School districts in the Fraser Valley are now growing every year. Every September, more students arrive in schools in Langley, Abbotsford, and Chilliwack. Langley grew by 1,200 students last year. Chilliwack and Abbotsford both grew by about 400. The more time that elapses between a school district asking for a school and the province funding it, the more students will eventually have to fit in it.

While all three big districts in the Fraser Valley have and are building new schools and additions, none of the projects will have much, if any, space to spare for future student population growth once they’re completed. 

Shovels in the dirt

Once the dream of a new school clambers off the paper and into reality, construction usually still takes about two years to complete. But while planning and funding processes might not change anytime soon, the timeline of school construction might. 

On a standard construction site, schools are built board-by-board, wall-by-wall, and floor-by-floor. 

But the province is looking to speed that process up with prefabricated processes in some areas.

In prefabricated construction, a method used to quickly build all kinds of big things, components are constructed in factories first. Then, trucks arrive on site hauling chunks of buildings—from boardroom to bathroom to bedroom—ready to snap together like oversized Lego.

More permanent than portable classrooms, prefabricated additions were planned for school districts in Metro Vancouver and on Vancouver Island last November. The province said it has similar projects in the works for Langley and Surrey schools. In Langley specifically, prefabricated classroom additions will add 150 new seats—or approximately five to six new classrooms (depending on the age of the students). 

(For nearby examples of prefabricated buildings, see Trinity Western University’s student housing buildings, Skidmore Hall and Jacobsen Hall. This reporter has lived in both, and they can be pretty nice.)

Prefabricated additions aren’t the same as a portable classroom, though the name might call to mind prefabricated homes (or mobile homes) that can be moved from place to place. Modern prefab buildings are often permanent standardized structures that can be built in half the time (and for less money) than a regular school addition. The lifespan of each of these buildings is 30 to 50 years. The upper limit for a standard school is about 60 years. 

In Coquitlam, a school district that recently received provincial funding for a prefabricated addition at a middle school, school board chair Michael Thomas said the plan was part of the best practices of school-building. 

“We know this model works and we are confident this addition at Scott Creek Middle will serve students well for years to come,” he said in a press release. 

While provincial funding for new school construction still lags behind Fraser Valley school district’s plans for new classrooms, faster construction methods—if widely adopted—might get some classrooms built faster.