We asked every school district in B.C. how many portables they have. Here's what we found
Surrey may have the most, but there are many places where a higher percentage of students use them
"There's no bathrooms," said Cassidy Holland, a fifth-grader at Goldstone Park Elementary.
"It was a lot more challenging to get in … with crutches, and I had to ask my friends for most of the help," said Narayan Nair, who just finished Grade 7 at École Martha Currie.
"When it stinks, it really stinks," added Jacob Bissonnette, who also just graduated from École Martha Currie.
When you talk to students in Surrey, B.C., about portables, common themes emerge: they're often small, have ventilation and accessibility issues, and create unequal learning opportunities for children attending the same school.
It helps explain why year after year, there are stories about the number of school portables in Surrey, about 34 kilometres southeast of Vancouver, with politicians at local and provincial levels pointing fingers at one another over who is to blame.
But the issue of school portables in B.C. aren't just confined to Surrey — and depending on how you look at the numbers, the city is nowhere close to the largest hot spot.
More than 2,000 portables
At the end of the 2022-2023 school year, CBC News asked all 60 public school districts in the province for their total number of portable classrooms. The provincial government said they did not have the information.
Adding up the numbers, there are 2,116 portables across the province. Unsurprisingly, Surrey had the most, with 361 portables, nearly triple the next highest of Burnaby, with 132.
There are caveats: some school districts didn't differentiate between portables used solely for classroom instruction and those used for maintenance, HR or other needs. And while the number of portables has clearly increased in B.C. over the decades, most school districts lack detailed data on the number over time.
However, one conclusion is clear: when adjusted for population, many school districts use portables much more than Surrey.
As of 2022/2023, Surrey has 4.6 portables for every 1,000 students enrolled in the district.
But there are 15 school districts with a higher per capita measure, including neighbouring Langley (4.9 portables per thousand students), Central Okanagan (5.0), Nanaimo (5.3) and Chilliwack with the most (5.9).
By the same token, Victoria has just 3.6 portables for every thousand students. Kamloops (3.4), Vancouver (2.4), Delta (2.2) and Prince George (1.1) are among the other larger school districts where a far smaller per cent of students are in portables.
So what accounts for the difference?
The answer is how much a school district has grown over the past 15 years.
Of the 20 largest school districts in B.C., the six with the smallest population growth — less than four per cent since 2007/2008 — all have fewer than 2.5 portables per 1,000 students.
Conversely, the 14 major school districts where enrolment has increased by at least four per cent over that time all have at least three portables for every 1,000 students.
Surrey is where the provincial political attention goes — but because the province doesn't fund the building of new schools until there are enough students to meet the demand, every large school district that's growing has faced the same pressures.
20th-century design for 21st-century teaching
But if portables are a byproduct of how B.C. plans and builds schools, is there a better way to design them?
"Portable classrooms were designed about 20-40 years ago, and they've had no updates," said Kristoffer Jugueta, an architectural designer working in Honolulu, Hawaii, who wrote his PhD thesis on rethinking the designs of portables so they enhance, rather than hinder, education experiences.
B.C. school districts have depended on portables since the post-Second World War baby boom, and while they are often intended as temporary solutions for construction or overcrowding, they often remain on campuses longer than anticipated.
Jugueta also argues the classic portable design is similar to the one-room schoolhouse classroom, where students all faced the same wall where a teacher taught at a blackboard.
"There's no collaboration, no hands-on learning, no group discussions, which is what you pretty much see today.
"What we're seeing today in modern-day classrooms are spaces that really cater to these types of learning."
In his thesis, he proposed a portable design, but one intended to be a permanent campus fixture flexible to the needs of a contemporary classroom.
It includes walls that can pivot so teachers can adjust the space to their needs, specific window placement to improve ventilation and let in natural light, and roof structured to create shade at high times of the day, and covered in solar panels so the classroom can produce its own energy.
Does it come down to money?
According to the owner of a B.C. company that manufactures portables, all of these options are doable.
"I do understand the problem and the beef with them," said Bryan DePedrina, principal at Fort Modular Inc., a Langley-based company that built portables for at least eight school districts this summer.
"If I had a kid in school and they got put into a portable that was built in 1989, with minimal insulation and poor ventilation and all of these other issues, I see that's where the problem lies."
DePedrina said portables built now are already superior to the relics from past decades, because the building code is constantly changing and portables are held to those standards.
"Anything built in the last five, maybe even 10 years … you're going to be getting an exceptional product. There's no reason why there would be any issues with the quality of the building or the structure itself or air ventilation," said DePrinda.
There is ample room for customized design choices, he said, because every portable is pre-cut, with his team assembling, framing and shipping the final product.
"There's no limitation of what goes into these," he said. "It's just a slightly different construction process."
But that requires additional costs — DePedrina said the lowest-end portable costs about $140,000 and the average price tag for school districts is roughly $200,000 per unit.
In other words, if portables are to improve, districts will have to fund them in a way that looks at them as more than a temporary measure.
"We had a district that wanted a classroom with three handicapped washrooms, a high-end ventilation system and all this stuff," said DePedrina.
"It's doable or it can be done. Just going to obviously be a more expensive build."
