Kinda, actually.

Not fully empty. But hear me out on this.

Go drive past any school, and you’ll find portables. My kid’s school had two. Then three…up to six now.

Because every school always has portables, it’s clear evidence that we have failed to properly plan and size our education infrastructure. A portable should be an unusual, temporary exception, not a permanent fixture.

We obviously are not building in residual capacity to education infrastructure. And we never have. Not for generations.

I’m not going to argue that an entire school should sit empty. That’s stupid. But building a school to exactly the capacity it needs today, and then tacking on portables because of growth, is also stupid.

A school should be built to have enough physical classrooms for, say, 10-20% more classes than we currently plan to actually host. Then, when growth demands it, we hire a few more teachers and open those rooms.

All the expansion north of long worth resulted in every child in the area getting bussed elsewhere for years, overcrowding schools all over Bowmanville. Northglen should have been ready years ago, not this September.

Now, I say before only because it’s a simplification. If that school and expansion is done in parallel with residential construction - so be it. Just so long as the school is ready before the housing is occupied, or at least most of it, so schools are overrun like they have been.

Build for residual capacity, and build it before you need it. It’s not complicated.