FROM THE DESK OF THE SUPERINTENDENT:
Dear Parents/Guardians and members of the community:
The Greater Victoria School District is in the process of a District-wide catchment boundary review. The review is considering all of our current school catchment boundaries to ensure our schools can accommodate student growth in the coming future.
As we plan ahead, we must address our capacity restraints and our growing student projections. This will require us to take a holistic approach that examines all our current catchment boundaries. We must ensure our student projections are in balance with space availability across the entire District. The District review will include considerations such as:
- Balanced enrolment across schools
- Capacity of Family of Schools
- Future housing starts
- Transportation
- Safe routes to school
- Enrolment priorities
- Staffing
- Enrolment projections
- Current students enrolled
- Specialized programming
To make certain the process is well informed, the District will be seeking public input with the intention of the review being completed in Spring 2019. This will give the community plenty of notice of the proposed catchment boundary changes before implementation in 2020.
Catchment Boundary Review - Public Engagement Timeline
| · Survey · Collect all data, feedback and present findings to the Board | November/December |
| Survey results go to Operations Policy and Planning Committee | December 10 |
| Technical: Vision/drawing of proposed catchment boundary borders | December/January |
| Bring revised maps to January Operations Policy and Planning Committee | January/February |
| Phase Two: Open Houses - "What We Heard" | February |
| · Collect all feedback to report back to the Board · Bring official report to Operations Policy and Planning Committee | February/March |
| Bring forward to Board of Education meeting for a final decision | March/April |
| Publish new maps | May |
| New catchment boundaries would be implemented in September 2020 | 2020 |
A survey will be sent out to our Greater Victoria school community exploring your boundary priorities as we look at all of our catchment areas throughout the School District.
We want to thank you for your valuable input into this catchment review and look forward to finalizing these changes in the spring.
Sincerely,
Shelley Green
Superintendent of Schools