By Lloyd Mackey

GREATER VICTORIA Christian Academy (GVCA) has closed its elementary and high school campuses in downtown Victoria – but will continue with some pre-school activity.

GVCA board chair Don Helliwell confirmed the closure in mid-June – citing dropping enrolment, and the urban siting of the school in two churches: Central Baptist and Church of Our Lord.

Nevertheless, GVCA’s pre-school and kindergarten programs will still operate at the latter church.

The move to the downtown campuses was a result of the decision of the public School District 61, to “deconstruct” the former Mt. View High School site on Carey Road – a campus GVCA had rented for more than two decades.

Helliwell said many parents were not happy with the downtown locations.

He noted the Central campus was only a block from the controversial safe-injection site for drug users. Enrolment, which had been close to 200 at the Carey Road campus, was down to about 120 after the move downtown.

Helliwell suggested the injection site, along with other nearby social agency facilities, means that many homeless people – some with drug abuse issues – render the area less than ideal for the locating of a Christian school.

The closure comes just two months after former principal Leland Makaroff told BCCN  the downtown locations helped acquaint students with the realities of urban life. And  it had seemed, as well, that the ‘landlord’ for one of the campuses, Central Baptist, saw the arrangement as a good use of its large Pandora Avenue facility.

In both a recent strategic internal study of the church and during its 80th anniversary celebrations, the GVCA setup was cited as a good first step in broader community use of the building.

Shortly after that, by mutual agreement, Makaroff’s contract as principal was not renewed. Makaroff has not been available for comment on his situation, and Helliwell was not prepared to discuss it.

He said the shutdown is sad in many ways, for the school, which began as a ministry of Trinity Christian Centre almost a quarter century ago, and transitioned to a transdenominational board and administration under its present name about a decade ago.

Another person who sees the closure as sad is Bill Helmus, elementary principal at Pacific Christian School (PCS). But Helmus noted that PCS has received applications from the parents of some 50 GVCA students, in both the elementary and high school programs.

Continue article >>

As it happens, PCS is currently completing arrangements for the purchase of the Montessori School, being vacated as that institution moves to a former public school.

Helmus says the purchase does not relate to the GVCA closing, but to PCS plans for major expansion at its campus bordering on Highway 17, adjacent to Victoria Christian Reformed Church – out of whose traditions it was established some four decades ago.

The Montessori purchase was intended to provide temporary accommodation for students dislocated by the expansion – but fortuitously, he suggested, will facilitate taking on former GVCA students without undue pressure.

Not all the GVCA students are heading for PCS. Helliwell said a fair number “will go into the public school system – and some, to Catholic and Seventh-Day Adventist schools.”

Ironically, some will be just up the street at St. Andrew’s School, a Catholic institution impacted by the same kinds of urban pressures as GVCA has faced.

Others will go to Lakeview Christian School, a more rurally-based Seventh-Day Adventist facility on the hillside just east of Elk Lake, as well as Lighthouse Christian Academy, in the Western Communities.

And still others are expected to be part of home-school programs – or, Helliwell noted, “may enroll in the Regent Christian Online Academy, whose Vancouver Island co-ordinator is a past GVCA principal, Mark Langley.”

Meanwhile, he says the school hopes to wrap up in “an essentially solvent position.” All assets have been on the block, so to speak, including computers, desks and two large vans. Most of the costs – as is the case with educational institutions of all types – were in teacher salaries and related labour items, he pointed out,.

He suggested, as well, that this may not be the end of the story with respect to GVCA. But maintaining a pre-school kindergarten program, the school may be able to rebuild a few years down the road.

Helliwell also admitted that acquiring a permanent campus is not easy in the Victoria setting, despite declining public school enrollment which leads to the closure of schools in the public system.

School District 61 policy is to bar the selling or renting of unused public schools to institutions that compete with them, he noted, carefully suggesting that it is not a case of public sector discriminating against Christians.

“It is just that they have their own struggles with declining enrollments,” he said, adding that he could understand their not wishing to with deal with “the competition.”

July 2007