School planning is key to building better Ottawa suburbs
Joanne Chianello, Ottawa Citizen
Published on: March 20, 2015, Last Updated: March 20, 2015 11:58 AM EDT
The trouble started when parking spots were painted onto what was once a drop-off lane outside St. Anne Catholic School.
Suddenly, parents who had been dropping their kids off in front of the school needed to try to find a place to park nearby. Some of them weren’t good neighbours, often blocking a homeowner’s driveway in the morning rush to make the 9:10 a.m. bell.
“There used to be two lanes in front of the school, one for buses and one for drop-offs,” says Kanata South Coun. Allan Hubley. “But now one of the lanes is parking for teachers, and that’s pushed cars into the neighbourhood, which has created a problem with the city.”
Hubley has ideas on how to help the situation — including rerouting the sidewalk onto an adjacent grassy knoll and turning the existing sidewalk into a drop-off area — but he points to the issue as one example of an area where the municipality and schools need to work together better.
Indeed, improving the partnership between the city and school was one of the major themes in the city’s report Building Better and Smarter Suburbs, which was tabled at planning committee last week.
A project launched back in 2013, the concept was to bring together residents, developers, school boards and others with an interest in planning the suburbs better. The group looked at everything from the best layout for roads to how to use storm water ponds to the communities’ best advantage.
Partnering with schools was seen as such an important issue that it is the subject of one of the three working groups looking at how to take the recommendations from the report and turn them into policies and guidelines (yes, this stuff takes years).
From a layperson’s point of view, the only thing to be said about the plan is that it’s about time.
How many parents have been stunned to find the local school’s playground locked on a weekend? Or found a schoolyard right beside a city-owned park (sometimes with a fence in between them!), when other parts of the community are starved for any green space?
That cities and school boards should come together to more efficiently use tax dollars — not to mention public land — is a no-brainer. It’s no surprise that the comments from the better-suburbs initiative indicate it would be “beneficial” to share parks and schoolyards and even libraries when possible.
It’s been done before. Perhaps the best example is John McCrae Secondary School, which is attached to both the Walter Baker Sports Complex and the public library. For new areas of the city in particular, combining these uses means more services earlier in these communities’ development.
At Adrienne Clarkson Elementary School, there are parking spots attached to the local park. School staff use the parking during weekday hours, leaving them free in the evenings and weekends for the public. Perfect.
People also want more sustainability from their schools, for the buildings themselves to take up less space — perhaps multi-level schools are in order — and for schools to be located in ways that make it easier to encourage so-called active modes of transportation (in English, that’s walking, biking and, by far the most fun, scootering).
Everyone is for better access to walking and cycling — but the development of a community hasn’t always unfolded in a way that makes sustainability planning easier to happen.
For one thing, we have four school boards, and they all want their schools to be in the centre of the community, reaching as many students as possible. This is why we end up with multiple schools on one street — which might be efficient for busing but terrible for providing neighbourhood schools to which children could walk. (More spread-out schools would be one of the bonuses of abolishing the publicly funded Catholic school board — a valid idea, but not part of this discussion.)
“There were times when we had a school site identified, and there was no road or sewer to that site yet,” explained Mike Carson, the chief financial officer and superintendent of facilities for the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board. Other times, he said, the board doesn’t have the money to build a school at the same time developers are building homes in a certain area.
Well, that’s what we need to change if we’re going to plan communities better.
We “front-end” community centres: Instead of saving up to build a rec centre, the city gets a developer to pay for and often build it and the municipality pays the company back. Why not do the same with schools?
We’ve been talking about addressing these problems for years. Perhaps we’re on the cusp of doing something about it. After all, Ottawa Centre MPP and cabinet minister Yasir Naqvi is supportive of the city’s better suburbs initiative. And Premier Kathleen Wynne gave the education minister a mandate to, among other things, “consider how to improve interactions between school boards and municipalities to ensure effective land-use planning.”
The city is projecting 84,000 new homes will be built between now and 2031, along with 50 new schools. Although their timelines and financial resources might be different, the city, the school boards, developers and the residents all pretty much have the same goal — to get services to residents sooner rather than later. It’s about time we find better ways to get that done.
jchianello@ottawacitizen.com
http://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/col...-col-chianello
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