Well before tiny Amelia Vugteveen was ready for solid foods, her parents registered her for French immersion in the New Westminster school district.
If you think that guarantees the local infant a spot in the program five years from now, you don’t know School District No. 40 French immersion, according to some frustrated local parents.
“Theoretically, because our daughter was born in November, it could be that there’s enough people registered from January through to the rest of the year that the chances go down just based on her birthday,” Amelia’s dad, Rick Vugteveen, told the Record.
That seemingly outlandish scenario stems from the school district’s first-come, first-served registration policy.
Vugteveen thinks it’s unfair, and he’s not alone.
Spots in New West’s French immersion programs go to the kids who were signed up first – not signed up first during the year they’re ready to start kindergarten; signed up first, period.
Savvy local parents register their offspring as soon as they’re born since the district puts kids in priority order as soon copies of their birth certificate and proof of residence are received and their application is date and time stamped.
Critics of the system say it’s not fair to kids who are born earlier in the year, families who move into the district when their kids are older or new parents who might miss the heads-up about needing to think about French immersion registration while negotiating the first few months of parenthood.
Vugteveen said he was lucky enough to find out on Twitter about the need to register Amelia as a newborn to give her a shot at getting into the program.
“We could see a lot of benefits from French immersion and thought let’s go and keep that option open to us because if we don’t do that now, we’re not going to have that option available to us when the time comes,” he said.
Mona Boucher, a Quebec-born francophone who’s lived in New West since 2011, wasn’t so lucky.
Her daughter Elise currently attends English kindergarten at Herbert Spencer Elementary despite having been registered for the school’s French immersion program at age 18 months in September 2011.
She’s got a spot in early French immersion next year, but she’ll have to move to Qayqayt Elementary to take it.
“I’m really happy that she got in to one of the two schools; it’s just sad that she’s got all these friends now and we’re going to have to switch,” Boucher told the Record.
Since siblings of students already in French immersion get priority access to the program at their schools, there were only six Herbert Spencer kindergarten spots up for grabs for next year, according to Boucher.
She would like to see them and other French immersion spots around the district filled through a lottery system despite some parents’ view that such a system would be too arbitrary.
“For those six kids getting into Spencer, that is winning the lottery now,” she said.
Some parents are so frustrated with the current system, they have pulled their kids from the district and enrolled them in French immersion elsewhere.
Amanda Semenoff moved to New West in 2012 when her daughter Miranda was four.
“When I went down to the New West district office to try and register my kids for French immersion, they laughed at me,” she told the Record. “I went back and I registered in Coquitlam.”
While she’s happy with her daughters’ school – her youngest, Miriam, starts French immersion in Coquitlam next year – she said her kids are losing out by not going to school with the kids they play sports with in New West.
Semenoff favours Coquitlam’s annual online, first-come-first-served registration system over New West’s.
But French learning advocates say registration processes aren’t the real problem.
“The underlying problem is making sure there’s enough space to meet the demand for French immersion,” said Glyn Lewis, executive director of Canadian Parents for French in B.C.
He said school districts with long wait-lists should expand their programs rather than tinker with registration systems.
“The point is the school district really putting in a plan to accommodate the demand that’s coming from families in that local community,” Lewis said.
Rather than doing that, however, he said some districts keep demand artificially low by not adequately promoting the programs or simply conceal the numbers on their waitlists.
“More secretive school districts will hold those numbers very closely,” Lewis said. “That’s information that they should be making publicly available, mostly so that we can keep them accountable.”
When the Record asked the district how many kids were on its French immersion wait-lists for next year, district vice-principal Belinda Scott said in an email, “Wait lists have duplicate names (meaning families are on more than one wait-list) and any number we give would not be accurate and could be misinterpreted as having a higher demand than there actually is.”
Asked about concerns that demand for early French immersion isn’t being met, Scott said the program was a “reasonable size” for a district of New West’s size.
Seventeen per cent of the district’s student population is currently enrolled in French immersion, she said, with 824 in early French immersion and 115 in late French immersion, which starts in Grade 6.
“The EFI program has been growing in numbers since it was first implemented,” Scott said. “For example, we have gone from 410 students enrolled in 2005 to 824 students in 2014/2015.”
As for changing the registration process, the district vice-principal said school officials are looking into establishing French immersion catchments, giving students a better chance at getting into the special program at the school closest to them.
Kids don’t currently get priority over out-of-catchment students when applying for French immersion at their neighbourhood school.
“We are always looking at ways to respond to parents’ concerns,” Scott wrote. “As part of examining boundaries for French immersion, we are looking at our current registration process and researching what other districts are doing. Right now it appears that neighbouring districts are using a lottery system with a limited application time frame.”
