Editor:
Re: School portable on rise again, Aug. 24.
Reading yet another story about the increase in portables at our city schools, I question whether this is actually an important issue.
Having recently spent 13 years in public surrey schools, I am all too familiar with the situation of portables.
While it is a minor inconvenience to leave the main school building to attend classes, and the portables are not quite as comfortable, overall nothing at all changes when a class is held in a portable. They are merely unsightly, and I think it makes it easy but somewhat misleading to point to them as a major problem with our education system.
Judging education by the condition and number of portable classrooms is like judging an adventure abroad solely by the comfort of the plane flight over.
Students are not at school for school edifices: they are there to learn. I would argue that we should focus, and you should report, on the quality of the knowledge being passed to students. It is a more complex issue but it is substantially the most crucial determinant of the quality of an education.
In 100 per cent of cases, I would prefer a good teacher and a strong school curriculum in a portable to a poor teacher and weak curriculum in the fanciest of school buildings.
It is not the structure that makes the educational experience, but the teachers and the educational opportunities at a school.
And in that, I think we in South Surrey and White Rock are incredibly rich.
Elise Burgert, White Rock
• • •
Thank you, school board trustee Terry Allen, for advocating a plan-ahead system for our schools!
I never could understand why the provincial government doesn’t allow Surrey to plan and build new schools based on projections for population growth, rather than waiting for our schools to be 110 per cent overfull and our students thereby underserved, before agreeing to fund more.
To get rid of portables and overcrowding, we have to plan ahead.
Please, Education Minister Rob Fleming, change the current backwards system now!
Geoff Dean, Surrey