It’s the planned rooftop playground that makes city hall balk
Pete McMartin
Sun
For over a decade now, Natacha Beim’s idea has been to build a school of higher learning in Vancouver.
About, oh, five storeys high.
It was to be a junior kindergarten, a school where three, four and five-year-olds would be exposed to a real curriculum.
As Beim’s website reads, the toddlers would be instructed “in areas such as mathematics, reading, writing, drama, science, visual arts, music, yoga and many more.”
At that age, I was still having difficulty learning how to unscrew my Oreo cookies, but Beim, who taught kindergarten in Europe, said the junior kindergarten model is popular there, where it is seen more as prep school than pre-school. It’s a head start for the diaper set.
Returning to Canada, she designed her own curriculum and founded Core Education & Fine Arts, or CEFA, in 1998.
As it turns out — and I’ll get to that later — she opened her first school not in Vancouver, but in West Vancouver.
Happily, there the fabled gene pool and parents’ pockets were deep enough to support a school such as Beim’s.
Installed in the Park Royal shopping centre, the school offered, among other things, “an in-house chef” who could prepare both vegetarian and non-vegetarian menus, a French immersion program and a “beautiful red carpet graduation ceremony” to give “children (and proud parents!) a sense of great accomplishment and immense pride in their abilities!”
Price?
About $1,250 a month for five days a week.
The response?
According to a 1998 North Shore News article, the waiting list was three years long.
A second CEFA school — this one franchised to one of Beim’s former teachers — opened in Burnaby in 2004, and Beim herself has just opened another school in Langley. It is 12,000 sq. ft. It has an enrolment of 200 children. It also has a chef, and a cinema.
Her application for the Langley school, Beim said, took only two weeks to approve.
Beim, however, hasn’t had the same luck in Vancouver, where she originally wanted to build a school.
Over the years, she said, the city and health authorities have rejected 17 of her applications for a site.
Her latest location was a five-storey building at 990 Homer in Yaletown.
Space, obviously, is at a premium in Yaletown, and Beim went to the city with plans to put the school on the building’s fifth floor and a play area on the building’s roof. The play area, she said, would be partly covered so the children could play outdoors.
But the city, she said, insisted the playground be on the same floor as classrooms, which, Beim said, could not be done. There wasn’t enough floor space.
It rejected her proposal on that basis.
“How is that possible in Yaletown?” Beim asked in a press release. “There are 116 residents per square kilometre. That’s 17 times more dense than the GVRD. Where are you going to find a 5,600 square foot outdoor space, in Yaletown, if not on a rooftop?”
She had, she said, a waiting list of 150 children.
She had “a stack of support letters from parents.”
And she had a landlord that had been waiting two years for her to move in.
But, as Beim would have it, she also had a city government that, while it had the vision to repopulate the downtown core with dozens of high-density high-rises, and thus proclaim itself a world leader in urban renewal, didn’t have the imagination to envision a toddler’s playground on a roof.
“Stringent guidelines for licensing child care facilities are important. But surely these guidelines should be sensitive to changing local geography and real estate conditions.
“I stand on that rooftop at 990 Homer, with the 150 applications in my hand, and I have to believe, at some point, the city is going to take a deep breath, look at my business, my track record, what I am trying to accomplish, and say, ‘Yes, let’s find a way to make this work’.”
She finally may have. After some TV coverage a couple of weeks ago, Beim was summoned to city hall Wednesday for a noon-hour meeting with Mayor Sam Sullivan.
She took some proposed changes to Sullivan so that the city might accommodate her plans for the school, and Sullivan, Beim said, made all the right noises.
Those plans, Beim said, include a specially designed elevator decorated to resemble a plane’s cockpit so that children, when they go for recess, can imagine they’re flying up to the roof.
It’ll be up to the city to decide if it gets off the ground.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006