‘Unusual’: Surrey schools see enrollment drop after decades of growth

The Surrey School District will be relying on a hard-fought budget surplus to deal with a revenue drop as it deals with an “unusual” drop in its overall enrollment numbers – after decades of regular growth in the number of students.

That’s according school board chair Gary Tymoschuk, who told the Surrey Citizen that smart financial planning has put the district in a good position to deal with the drop in enrollment.

School trustees heard Wednesday that the district now has a K-12 enrollment of 78,683 – the figure doesn’t include adult and online learners – a drop of 350 students from at this point in 2024.

“It’s unusual for Surrey, for sure,” Tymoschuk said.

Other than during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic – which Tymoschuk called an “anomaly” – the district hasn’t seen a drop in decades. By comparison, a 2024 Surrey School District report detailed it had grown by an average of 2,598 students over the previous two years – triple the average over the previous decade. 

The drop wasn’t a total surprise as changes were expected due to the federal government reducing immigration levels.

“As soon as the federal government indicated a reduction in immigration levels, we knew it was going to have an effect on our system because of lot of our students are as a result of immigration,” Tymoschuk said.

Fewer students mean less revenue from the province, which funds district on a per-pupil basis, but Tymoschuk said that with a $1 billion budget, the district won’t see a huge drop in revenue.

“That means our revenue is going to be going down,” Tymoschuk said. “Luckily, we have a bit of a surplus.”

The surplus is $33 million, which sounds like a lot but isn’t that much for a $1 billion budget. The district also needs to spend $16 million to replace is ERP system, a data processing system that handles everything from payroll to juggling ever-changing enrollment data. The system is from the 1980s, Tymoschuk said, and needs updating.

“That knocks out half of the money (in the surplus),” Tymoschuk said.

Still, the district is in a much better position than last school year when it faced a budget shortfall of $16 million, which meant that cuts had to be made, Tymoschuk said.

Fewer students won’t necessarily ease the overcrowding issue in Surrey, either.

More than 700 new classroom spaces were added this summer in Surrey, with 2,300 more starting construction.

But the school district still has 353 portables, Tymoschuk said, with 45 of them actually sitting empty because there are at schools that now don’t need them.

The problem is it costs more than $100,000 to move just one of the portables from one location to another, Tymoschuk said, and that cost has to be paid by the Surrey School District out of its operating budget, which trustees have decided will not happen.

The B.C. government says that since 2017, it’s spent $6 billion, including $1 billion in Surrey, to fund new schools and additions. For Surrey, that’s meant more than 16,000 new spaces.

In fall 2025, more than 700 new student seats opened at new classrooms in Surrey:

• Woodland Park Elementary – 400 new seats 
• Walnut Road Elementary – 100 new seats
• Theresa Clarke Elementary – 225 new seats

Over the summer, construction started on more than 2,300 new seats for the following school projects:

• Kwantlen Park Secondary – 500 new seats
• Martha Currie Elementary – 150 new seats
• Old Yale Road Elementary – 425 new seats
• Latimer Road Elementary – 150 new seats
• William Watson Elementary – 300 new seats
• George Greenaway Elementary – 350 new seats
• Guildford Park Secondary – 450 seats

Since 2024, the B.C. government has announced additions at Fleetwood Park, Kwantlen Park and Tamanawis Secondary schools, the opening of Ta’talu Elementary and new permanent spaces at Walnut Road, South Meridian and Semiahmoo Trail Elementary schools.