Burnaby parks and rec doesn’t want to discriminate between public school and private school students when it comes to picking volunteers for summer camp and playground programs.
This despite an email last month from a volunteer coordinator to a Catholic school parent saying the city has a "longstanding partnership" with the school district that favours public school kids.
“We place those students first, then we do our best to place the other applicants,” reads the email from John Renko, recreation leader at Eileen Dailly Leisure Pool and Fitness Centre.
The parent who got the letter wasn’t impressed.
“So I pay taxes, yet we are treated as second class citizens?” he wrote in an email to the NOW. “I would like to know more about this ‘long standing partnership’ and perhaps in what other areas the City of Burnaby is practising active discrimination.”
The father, who said he did not want his name used for fear of further discrimination, is a longtime Burnaby resident and taxpayer.
His daughter attends Little Flower Academy in Vancouver, but she wanted to volunteer closer to home during the summer.
Burnaby parks and rec got 322 applications last year for 277 volunteer spots in the city’s summer camp and playground programs, according to city staff, and at least 95 per cent of the volunteers picked were from the school district.
But the city doesn’t actually have a partnership with the school district for filling those spots, according to Burnaby’s assistant director of recreation Craig Collis.
When asked about the “longstanding partnership” referenced in Renko’s email, he said he could find no evidence of a written agreement.
“I like to think that partnerships are based on some sort of written agreement,” he said, “and, in the absence of that, I hesitate to call it a partnership.”
Why Renko would have had the impression such a partnership existed was a mystery to Collis.
“The agreement may have been a verbal one or it perhaps was written at some point, but we currently don’t have any record of it,” he said. “Oftentimes what happens with these things is that staff come and go for various reasons, and with them goes the basis of some of these practices, so I have a feeling that may have been what happened here.”
Favouring public school students, however, is not something the city plans to keep doing, according to Collis, who added the parent’s complaint has given the city a chance to re-examine the way volunteers are picked.
“It appears that there may be an opportunity here to have a look at this to make sure that we’re providing equal opportunity for people both at the public schools and the private schools,” he said.
