geography

"There are large numbers of students enrolled in west side schools who do not actually live in the catchment area. These students are very hard to identify and quantify because there is so much lying and deceit involved in their registration. This issue is widely known in the system but no one addresses it for fears of charges of racism and discrimination. Nevertheless, we often eventually find that a student's real residence can be as far away as Burnaby or Richmond. What happens is that parents establish at best a temporary residence on the west side for enrolment purposes using various means. Sometimes, they will legitimately rent a property for a brief time, although they may never take up residence. Most frequently, they claim fictitious addresses -- some may not even exist, others are 'rented' or 'borrowed' from friends or relatives. Despite school requirements for proof of residence, these documents are easily arranged and schools do not have the resources to investigate the legitimacy of these claims."

Derek Swain, The Vancouver Sun

In 2010, the Vancouver School Board propsed to shut down 5 elementary schools which were percieved as no longer functioning at a capacity worth the school board's investment. All of these schools were on Vancouver's East Side. While it is widely known that Vancouver's East Side does not enjoy the neighbourhood wealth that is attributed to the West Side, it seems that this perhaps has an effect on the geography of student populations in schools.

The theory is that parents of children on Vancouver's East Side, knowing that the schools on the west side have more wealthy children attending them, are transferring their children out of the local catchment area school and sending them cross-boundary to schools on the West Side. The reasons for this range from more school funding, to better extra-curricular activities at the West Side schools, to a higher quality of education.

The Vancouver School Board vehemently denies this, saying that the reasoning for slating the East Side schools for closure has more to do with the number of schools there by comparison to the number of students, not that the schools on the East Side are any less regarded than those on the West. While this is unlikely the cause for the drop in students on the East Side, it is certainly hard to use any data to invalidate this theory.

With this idea in mind, I decided to look at Vancouver’s secondary schools to see if these same patterns hold true, and what a possible cause for this stark difference between east and west could be. Using the same divide as for the elementary schools (Main St.) as a boundary between West and East Vancouver, I used ArcGIS and Excel documents, as well as data from multiple sources and databases, to analyze this trend.