This is the priority I would put in front of a voter who has no child in school, because it is the one that is plainly about money already spent. We are heating and maintaining empty space at one end of the system while putting children in portables at the other. That is not a scandal and nobody did anything wrong, it is what happens when a population shifts faster than a building plan. But it is worth looking at squarely.

I am not proposing to close a school. Enrolment has fallen since that plan was written and the picture needs updating before anyone draws conclusions, and in my experience closure talk that starts before the analysis is finished does a community real harm for no gain.

What I would do

• Ask for the facilities plan to be refreshed against current enrolment, and for the results to come to the board in public.
• Support capital submissions that fix the actual mismatch, including the Gibsons Elementary expansion and the Sunshine Building seismic work, rather than spreading small amounts thinly.
• Insist that any conversation about reconfiguration starts with the community affected, early, and not with a recommendation already written.

I want to be careful here, because spending reserves to protect services through a hard year is a defensible choice and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But it is a choice you can only make twice. The board elected on 17 October writes the 2027-28 budget with nothing left to soften it, which means real decisions rather than paper ones.

Some of that enrolment decline is beyond the board’s reach. In February the community plan commission I chair ran a town hall in Roberts Creek, and one of the things residents said they wanted was for seniors, young families and workers to be able to afford to live here. A district loses students when a community stops being affordable to the people raising them, and it struggles to hire the education assistants and bus drivers it needs from a housing market that has priced them out. A school board does not fix that. But a board that never mentions it is not being straight with you either.

The part that worries me is not the arithmetic. It is the order things get cut in. When money runs short, the first reductions are almost always the quiet ones, because they are the easiest to justify on a page: a counsellor position left vacant, an education assistant not replaced, a bit less release time. Nobody notices for a year. Then everybody notices.

What I would do

• Ask for the multi-year projection in public session, not just the year in front of us, so the cliff is visible to the public before the decisions arrive rather than after.
• Vote to protect classroom support and counselling before anything else, and say so out loud at the budget table so it is on the record.
• Ask what each proposed reduction actually does to a student, and require that answer before the vote. That is a question a trustee can insist on without a majority.

This is the one I care most about, and it is the one I spent sixteen years on in Ontario, where I pushed hardest on mental health supports. A student who does not feel safe or wanted is not available for learning. Everything else the district funds depends on getting that right first, and the completion gaps above are what it looks like when we do not.

It is also measurable, which matters. The district already collects this. The question is whether the board looks at it every year and asks what changed, or whether it appears in a report and goes past.

What I would do

• Bring the belonging figures to the board in public session every year, and ask what was done since the last time. A trustee does not need a majority to ask a question.
• Support the completion of an Enhancement Agreement with the shíshálh Nation and the Skwxwú7mesh Nation.
• Support SOGI 123 and inclusive schools without reservation. Every student has the right to be safe at school and to learn without hiding who they are.
• Protect counselling and youth-care work in the budget, which is where this priority meets the budget.

Those three numbers together say something the funding formula does not fully recognise. Our schools do more social work, more feeding, more catching of kids who would otherwise fall, than a district with a wealthier intake. The staff who do that work are the supports described above, which is why the two priorities are really one.

It also means the Coast has a case to make to Victoria, and a board that makes it with actual numbers is harder to ignore than one that asks generally for more.

What I would do

• Use these figures in every submission the board makes to the Ministry and to the BC School Trustees Association, because a district that carries a heavier load should be funded like one.
• I spent six years as a vice-president of the Ontario Public School Boards’ Association making exactly this kind of case to a provincial government. That is transferable work and I would do it here.
• Resist any reduction that shifts the load onto classroom teachers who are already carrying it.