Burnaby independent school parents are fed up with the Burnaby school district for a summer school registration process they say is unfair to kids who go to local private schools.
For years, local private school parents have lined up outside the district office with other parents from outside Burnaby and parents of international students to register in person for School District No. 41 summer school classes, which attracted a total of nearly 8,000 students last year.
Local public school students, meanwhile, were able to register online one week earlier.
“We live in Burnaby and pay taxes in Burnaby,” Sandra Wong, a mom at a local Catholic school wrote in a Jan. 25 letter to the district. “We should not have to register so late and hope to get a spot in a summer school.”
The district changed its process this year, giving all students a chance to register on the same day on April 18 by getting information from non-School District No. 41 students during a pre-registration day April 12.
For the district, it’s a matter of paperwork.
“If you are not in our system, we don’t have any of those records and they can change year to year,” assistant superintendent Roberto Bombelli told the NOW, “so when someone is not in the system, we need to see them.”
The new system gives everyone a chance to be on equal footing with Burnaby public school students come online registration day, he said.
But that’s missing the point, according to Wong and other independent school parents, who say local students shouldn’t have to compete for spots with students from outside of Burnaby.
“I think if you don’t live in Burnaby and you don’t live in the country, you should have to wait till people that actually live in the city are able to register,” Wong said. “That just makes sense to me.”
Wong also suspects opening online registration to everyone at the same time crashed the online system Monday and jammed the district’s phone lines.
“It’s just common sense,” she said. “You let all those people on there and the system’s not going to be able to handle it … They should have staggered it.”
After a couple of server crashes on Monday, the district announced all further summer school registration would be delayed until April 25, and a notice on the district website instructs parents not to call the summer session office to register.
“Our online server had a technical issue when we opened up online registration,” Bombelli said, “and I think that caused a whole lot of people who were not able to get on the website to phone, and it flooded our phone system … People were upset because it flooded the system to the point that you just couldn’t get through and then it filled the voicemails.”
But Bombelli said it’s doubtful the new pre-registration system was to blame for the crashes.
The volume of registration on Monday was higher this year than last, he said, with about 2,100 students managing to register between crashes, but only 180 students were pre-registered under the new system on April 12.
“I don’t believe that 180 people would have changed what happened with that server,” Bombelli said.
He said the district is building a new server and the system should be up and running Monday.
