Francophone students and parents at École Beausoleil rallied at Victoria city hall and the B.C. legislature Friday to protest their pending “eviction” from the former Sundance School in June.
The French school district, Conseil Scolaire Francophone de la Colombie-Britannique, has rented the Sundance building on Bank Street from the Greater Victoria School District since 2015, when École Beausoleil first launched as a Kindergarten-to-Grade 3 school.
But the lease expires this year and the Greater Victoria district plans to reclaim the building and reopen it next fall to deal with increasing enrolment and space pressures.
Beausoleil parents say their children are being treated like “second-class citizens” and will be moved to modular classrooms at Braefoot Elementary until a permanent francophone school gets built.
And they say that flies in the face of a Supreme Court of Canada decision last year that found francophone students are entitled to “an education experience that is substantively equivalent to the experience of the majority.”
Rebecca Mellett, who has a child in Grade 3 at École Beausoleil, said work has yet to begin on the temporary accommodations at Braefoot and parents are worried their children will have no place to go in September.
École Victor-Brodeur, the other francophone school in Greater Victoria, is full and unable to accommodate all of Beausoleil’s 86 students, she said.
“Parents are furious. They’re upset. About 25 per cent of our parents have already started to sign their kids up in other schools — their neighbourhood schools — because they’re worried that nobody will be able to deliver a quality school at this temporary place in September.”
Mellett said parents object to the fact that the francophone school district has no access to school properties across the city, because the Greater Victoria school district holds a monopoly.
“The forced move to a substandard interim school with portables set on a bog without confirmed play facilities or before- and after-school care services is a violation of the rights of francophone children in Victoria,” the parents’ association said.
Carl Monk, who has a child in Grade 2 at Beausoleil, said the situation is made worse by the fact that Beausoleil students and staff will have to share a property with another school in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“So, all the things you wouldn’t want to do in a pandemic in terms of transmission is happening,” he said.
B.C.’s Ministry of Education said in a statement that it’s working with the francophone and Greater Victoria school districts on a solution for the students at École Beausoleil and will have more to say soon.
“Our government is committed to ensuring students have access to the same robust education in both of Canada’s official languages, and we understand the concerns of families who want a permanent school for their children in their community,” the statement said.
The Greater Victoria school district referred a request for comment to the ministry, while Conseil Scolaire Francophone declined to comment.
