When Amber Woodward walks her seven-year-old son through Renfrew Elementary School, the first thing she notices are the leaks.

“When it rains really hard, there’s water pouring through walls and pooling on the landing,” said Woodward. “The administration and the staff do the best they can with the facility they have … but obviously, it needs work.”

Distroscale

Renfrew is one of 87 Vancouver schools that is in “poor” or “very poor” shape due to years of deferred maintenance the district simply doesn’t have the money to address, according to a school board report.

Only 13 of the board’s 110 schools were in “good” or “excellent” condition, according to the 2018 review. Updating all its buildings to present-day standards — with modern lighting, plumbing and heating — would cost $740 million.

“It has just built up over the years,” said board chair Janet Fraser. “The average age of our schools is over 70 years old, and old buildings take more money to maintain.”

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The Ministry of Education divides an annual grant of $115.5 million between the province’s 60 school districts to help with repairs. This year and last, Vancouver received just over $11 million.

Other money comes from the school board’s $63-million operations and maintenance budget, which accounts for roughly 13 per cent of its total funding — only enough to fully maintain around 10 per cent of the city’s schools.

“Because the operating fund is utilized to undertake maintenance and repairs of aging building systems, a disproportionate amount of the operating budget, compared to other Lower Mainland districts, is directed to that effort,” wrote school board secretary-treasurer David Green in a statement.

Fraser said the board has applied for a larger grant from the province and the board is “carefully considering” development to fund repairs. In the meantime, staff focus on keeping schools safe.

“They have to triage and look at the things that are most important to be undertaken straight away,” she said.

Ongoing seismic upgrades don’t always translate into repairs to other parts of a school. Renfrew Elementary recently underwent a partial seismic upgrade, but the building still has over $6 million in deferred maintenance.

The board said even new schools will have their useful lives impacted by the shortage of funding.

“The situation is: our school district and every school district in B.C. has to do the best they can with the money they’ve got,” said Fraser.

Woodward doesn’t like the leaks, but she said her top priority is that her child attends a seismically safe school.

“The state of the school is a reflection of the lack of funds that the VSB has,” she said.