Community: Local firefighters search for hope in Nepal. 3
Sport Charity hockey game Sports: back and growing. 33
Education: Students tops at speaking French. 16 Fr i d ay, M ay 8, 2 015 · mapleridgenews.com · est. 1978 · (office) 604-467-1122 · (del iver y) 60 4 - 46 6- 6 39 7
Classes larger than B.C. average By Neil Corbett ncorbett@mapleridgenews.com
Class sizes in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows used to be lower than the provincial average, but after three years of budget cuts, classrooms here are more crowded than the mean. The provincial class size report shows that the average in Maple Ridge is higher at every grade level for the 2014-2015 school year. At the Kindergarten level, there are 20.1 students in Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows compared with a provincial average of 19.5. At Grades 1-3, the difference is 22 locally compared with 21.5 provincially. For Grades 4-7, it is 26.5 locally compared with 25.6 provincially. And at the high school level, the district average is 23.7 compared with 23.2 for all of B.C. Local educators say it’s a bad trend. “Our board has expressed concern with having to increase class size over each of the past two years, and we’re reluctant to do so again,” said school board chairman Mike Murray. The high school number is misleading, because it does not represent the true average in the district. Murray said some very low class sizes skew the numbers downward. In reporting the numbers, school district superintendent Sylvia Russell noted that “… the class size averages at Grades 8-12 appear lower than what is experienced by students at most schools because of the inclusion in the report of classes that support students with special needs, trades partnership programs and specialty classes – all of which have a smaller class size.” See Classes, 16
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The city is dealing with a growing homeless camp off Cliff Avenue, near the Salvation Army shelter in downtown Maple Ridge.
Cliff Ave. getting crowded Bylaw enforcement eased, results show B y P h i l M e l nychuk pmelnychuk@mapleridgenews.com
Once the enforcement was relaxed and people were no longer told to keep moving along from Cliff Avenue, the cosy little street behind the Salvation Army’s Caring Place, the dimensions of the problem became apparent. Tents went up, blankets were
thrown onto the fence and, according to longtime resident Mike Homen, a little bike part business and bottle depot opened. With bylaws no longer moving people for the last week or so, the number of campers has grown to about 20. Read “The incidents of rudeness are escalating,” Homen said. “People pass out in the dirt.” He sees cars pull up for a few
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minutes, then peal off. He sees women getting into cars and taking off. He can’t relax at his home, on Cliff Ave. “I’m at work, ‘How many of them are going to be there when I get home?’” The city relaxed its move-along approach so it could a get more accurate idea of the extent of the homeless problem, said Maple Ridge Mayor Nicole Read.
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“The enforcement presence is masking the depth of the problem, which we can now all see very clearly. Bylaw resources moving people around is not a solution,” Read said on Facebook. “We wanted to get a sense of what the situation would look like. We spend money all the time on bylaws in that area,” she added Wednesday. Read said the camp will be dispersed, but the approach will be compassionate and gradual. See Camp, 5
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