Edel Walsh (left) and Rose Palozzi say Lord Roberts School’s recent loss of a social program benefitting disadvantaged students could hurt many families in the West End.

Credit: Doug Shanks

NEWS: West End students cut out of social program

It has been widely noted by media that British Columbia possesses the highest child-poverty rate in Canada. According to the most recent Child Poverty Report Card, released in November 2009 by First Call, a B.C.-based child and youth advocacy group, the province has maintained this unfortunate statistic since 2003. Furthermore, child poverty has grown dramatically here throughout the last decade, the report says, while national rates declined as the economy grew.

In Vancouver, the incidence of child poverty is underlined by the number of local public schools — 14 to date — that make use of funding from the Vancouver School Board’s Inner City School Project, established in 1988 to provide support and services to elementary students facing economic and social challenges. The $2.7-million program uses a Social Services Index (SSI), prepared by the Ministry of Education and Ministry of Children, Families, and Development, to determine which schools have a critical mass of vulnerable students, and provides them with a meal program for all eligible students, as well as resource staff such as a youth and family worker and a neighbourhood assistant. Lord Strathcona Elementary School, in the Downtown Eastside, currently ranks highest for SSI averages and student vulnerability.

Last week, (Feb. 15), the Vancouver School Board controversially voted to pull Inner City School Project funding from the West End’s Lord Roberts Elementary School and Annex.

“I know that’s not what the school community was looking for,” says COPE school trustee Jane Bouey, who voted to cut the funding. “I don’t think there was anyone in terms of staff or trustees that were happy with the decision.”

Bouey notes that five other schools are ahead of Lord Roberts in the Inner City rankings. Given the cuts expected in the 2010 provincial budget, she expects the Vancouver School Board to be $18- to $38-million short.

“One of the things we’ve discussed as a board is that with cuts to [Ministry of Children and Family Development] and mental-health supports and those sorts of things, it’s increasing the pressures and stresses upon school boards to pick up that slack,” Bouey says. “A lot of those students are students that come from families that are the working poor.”

NPA school trustee Ken Denike was the only trustee to vote against pulling Inner City funding from Lord Roberts. “I lived in the West End for about three years... and I saw who was living around me. The families sending their kids to the schools — public schools — don’t reflect the sort of gentrification population that’s in the West End,” he says.

Denike pointed to the West End’s heavy population density, large renter population, and range of family incomes — many of which are middle- to low-income — as reasons Lord Roberts should have retained Inner City funding.

Parents of Lord Roberts students have started a letter-writing campaign to MLAs, asking the provincial government to ensure adequate funding for the public-education system in its upcoming provincial budget, to be announced March 2. “There’s just not enough coming down the pipe to meet the needs of all the kids,” says Rose Palozzi, whose daughter is in Grade 4 at Lord Roberts. “I know more than two [Lord Roberts] families where there are five people living in a one-bedroom household. Imagine the pressure that puts on every single person in that household.”

“There’s a lot of immigration into the West End, families that are coming from war-torn countries. They’re starting over, and the one place their children can have stability and continuation is at school,” adds Lord Roberts parent Edel Walsh. “They’re under-housed, there’s many generations trying to live in a small apartment... The children should be able to come to school and know that the support systems are in place, that they’re not going to get pulled out from under them, that lunch programs are available. All of this is hugely important to the infrastructure of a child’s life.”

Helesia Luke, director of the BC Society for Public Education, has led community-driven campaigns for public-education funding for years. “We’re encouraging all parents to write letters to their MLAs,” she says.

Luke and her colleagues have set up a template letter at StopEducationCuts.org. “Everyone is understandably distracted by the Olympics, but they’re going to wake up literally two days later and the budget will have come down already,” she says.

Luke notes that recommendations made in November 2009 by the provincial government’s own Select Standing Committee on Finance and Government Services suggest that the government, working in conjunction with boards of education, conduct a comprehensive review of the education-funding formula. “It’s not like they haven’t heard this before,” Luke says. “As the resources decrease, there are more and more people fighting for a smaller share of a smaller pie... So, where do you say, ‘Enough is enough?’”