By: Olivia Sherman, News Writer
Nestled in North Vancouver’s Calverhall neighbourhood for over 40 years, Cloverley Park has provided green space, a playground, a tennis court, and sledding hills for its residents. However, the park will soon be paved over to make way for the new Cloverley Elementary School, scheduled for opening and enrollment in 2026. Residents of the area are concerned the building is threatening the community’s much-needed green space. “It’s a really active park and it’s an integral part of the community,” said Barry Shaw, a neighbourhood activist and campaign member for Save Cloverley Park.
The original Cloverley Elementary still resides on the property. The old building has been vacant since 2014, after the renovations of nearby Ridgeway Elementary and Queen Mary Elementary were completed. The current plans for the new Cloverley Elementary have the structure set on the park side of the property, where the field, flower garden, playground, and tennis courts reside. Rather than building on the existing gravel field, where the vacant building already sits, the grass field and playground are to be paved over for the new school’s parking lot.
A new elementary school in North Vancouver is direly needed, according to North Vancouver-Lonsdale MLA Bowinn Ma. Ridgeway Elementary’s student body doubled from around 330 students to 673 in the span of 10 years. Many elementary schools in the city rely heavily on portable classrooms. The new Cloverley Elementary will enrol almost 600 students and will contain a childcare centre for infants and toddlers.
Shaw noted the intent of the Save Cloverley Park campaign is not to deter the school from being built. In fact, the community is “eager for that to happen, [they] just want it to be built in the right place.” Voicing these concerns has proven difficult, with the School Board becoming “really close-looped.” Shaw said the School Board meeting on November 21 didn’t do much to quell dissatisfaction with the plans. “They haven’t consulted the community [ . . . ] They’ve not been eager to have community input.”
Another concern with the location of the new building is road access. Cloverley Park faces Kennard Street, which Shaw estimates to be on a 14.5 degree slope, often closed in the winter due to unsafe driving conditions. This same hill is where the School Board proposes the entrance to the driveway to be. Shaw encourages North Vancouver city officials to visit the park and survey the grounds themselves.
The Peak contacted School Board trustee Kulvir Mann, who stated the “school district is working with a team of consultants to ensure the proposed site best meets the needs of a growing community.” They are working together to design a “school that is safe, accessible, sustainable, and flexible in design.” Mann also noted the increased capacity of the new Cloverley Elementary. They hope the new school will “meet the teaching and learning needs of students and staff for years to come.” The old school “had a capacity for 265 students,” compared to the new school’s “capacity for 585 students, in addition to space to accommodate 37 childcare spaces. This means the footprint of the new school must be larger.”
The initial costs for the construction and opening of the new Cloverley Elementary skyrocketed from $21.6 million to $64 million. Shaw said the increased cost could be a factor, suspecting it would cost less to construct a new school on the grass field rather than on the already existing property. The city of North Vancouver is also responsible for the cost and maintenance of Cloverley Park, such as mowing the grass, repairing the playground, and upkeeping its many trees around the perimeter, but Shaw said “they haven’t really been putting a lot of time and money into it.”
Shaw himself has filed a freedom of information request to determine the reason why the school won’t be built over the old one, but received “stonewalling and pushback from the school district.”
In 2017, the North Vancouver School District (NVSD) considered selling the property, including the park and tennis court, to developers. The proposal was met with severe public backlash, and the plans were dropped. Shaw said this was “amazingly short-sighted of the School Board, at the time,” noting how the NVSD severely underestimated the overcrowding in their elementary schools only years later.
Another School Board meeting is scheduled for January 17. “We think it’s going to be a really packed crowd there because the school district hasn’t really been good at communicating with, and involving the community,” Shaw said. “This type of meeting should have been done a year ago so that there would be no contentious comments.”
As a neighbourhood campaign, Save Cloverley Park is comprised of “people that are trying to do the best for our kids. And we have other thoughts as to how things should be done, but the overall thought is, ‘this is for our kids,’ and we want a school. We just want it in the right place.”
For more information, visit the campaign website at cloverleypark.ca/.
