The B.C. government is defending the pace of its buildout of schools in Surrey as students in the province’s most populous school district prepare to head back to the classroom.
Surrey’s school enrolment hit more than 83,000 last year, an increase of 1,500 from the year before, and the district has been forced to get increasingly creative with ways to house them.
Eight schools have already moved to extended day schedules, and this year some Grade 10 through Grade 11 students will take partially remote classes through a new hybrid learning pilot project.
On Tuesday, the NDP government announced it was opening 700 new student seats in the district, including 400 in a new addition to Woodland Park Elementary, along with 100 new seats at Walnut Road Elementary and Theresa Clarke Elementary.
Infrastructure Minister Bowinn Ma said another 2,300 seats are currently underway, most of them due to come online between winter 2026 and fall 2027.
Pressed on whether that was enough to ease pressures in a district bursting at the seams, Ma said the province was working overtime to catch up with a demographic boom that has overwhelmed its building efforts.
Ma said the province saw its population grow by 200,000 people between 2023 and 2024, and that for every 10,000 new residents B.C. needs another 51 classrooms.
Get breaking National news
For news impacting Canada and around the world, sign up for breaking news alerts delivered directly to you when they happen.
“I challenge anyone to find a jurisdiction aside from maybe China that could build that quickly,” Ma said.
She said the Ministry of Infrastructure was created specifically to address this challenge, and pointed to the Woodland Park addition, built using modular construction in 18 months, as an example of how it was tackling the problem.
“(These) can be delivered in half the time at half the cost. These are the kinds of innovative solutions that are allowing us today to announce updates today on basically the most number of seats we have ever provided an update in a single year before, 700 new seats that are opening this fall and an additional 2,300 seats that are under construction.”
Ma, however, admitted that districts across the province and Surrey in particular are facing difficult choices, including options like remote learning and extended days.
Surrey’s altered class schedules come after the district faced a $16-million budget shortfall for 2025-2026 that resulted in the closure of alternative learning programs and the end of the Grade 7 band program.
The district says it also can’t afford new portables, as it is forced to pay for them from its operating budget which is used to pay for staff and programming.
Gary Tymoschuk, chair of the Surrey Board of Education, said there is no question Surrey still has a pressing need for additional seats.
But he sought to assure parents concerned about the hybrid classes, which he said will both deal with the class space crunch while preparing kids for the 21st century workforce which often uses remote and hybrid models.
“We are hearing from some parents that they are actually grateful that we are going down this path because they want their children to learn how to effectively use tools like Zoom and MS Teams,” he said.
“For those parents who have concerns, and no question there are some, we invite parents to have conversations with their principal of their children’s school and see what kinds of accommodations can be worked out.”
Tymoschuk couldn’t say exactly how many students will participate in the hybrid classes, but said it was a “small percentage of the total.”
Surrey District Parent Advisory Council president Anne Whitmore said that while she was pleased to see more classroom space, tacking additions onto schools leaves them with more students and fewer central resources.
“There’s no increased gym space, resource room, office administration, learning center, and all of those things are essential to the school community,” she said.
She added that the actual net gain in new seats is smaller than the numbers the province is announcing.
“We do the math because in Surrey, of the 40 modulars that were given, 19 of them were replacing existing portables,” she said.
“So when the ministry talks about 40 new classrooms or multiply that by 25, you know, that many new seats, they actually are not new seats.“
Ma said since taking power the NDP government had spent $1 billion to deliver 16,000 new student spaces in Surrey.
She said she was hopeful new federal caps on immigration will help stabilize population growth and let the province start to catch up with infrastructure.
© 2025 Global News, a division of Corus Entertainment Inc.
