One lease, one subsurface sale, ten years

A count like this should take an afternoon with a register. There is no register, so it took six files, three bodies and a court judgment.

The count.

Those four figures are the whole finding, and everything below shows where each one comes from and what had to be read to produce it¹.

The ledger, six rows.

Six rows, and only one of them is a completed long-term lease of school land inside the period. One more is a completed sale of an interest in land, at the Lord Roberts Annex, where only the subsurface parcel moved. No row is an outright sale of a whole site¹.

Two rows that are commonly read the wrong way.

The Lord Roberts Annex did not leave the enrolling inventory. The surface was retained and a replacement school stands on the site, so a count that records it as a site disposal removes a working school from the tally¹.

Kingsgate Mall falls outside the period as an action. The lease predates the ten years counted here, and what falls inside the window is a court ruling rather than a board decision².

Removing those two misreadings is what takes the count of whole-site sales to zero.

The closure round that produced nothing.

On 3 October 2016 the Board suspended a closure process covering eleven schools, and none of the eleven were closed by 30 June 2017³.

A round that ends this way produces no bylaw and no instrument, so it registers in no count of closures and no count of disposals. It appears in a news release. The ten-year record therefore opens with a process that consumed a year of public attention and left no entry in any ledger of outcomes.

How long each step took.

Two of the intervals in the ledger can be measured directly.

The one completed lease took 40 months from surplus declaration to third reading of the by-law⁴. The one other site that reached a surplus declaration has now been in that state for 41 months with no instrument executed⁵. Those two figures are close, and the record read carries no target, standard or expected duration against which either could be assessed.

Why the count had to be assembled.

No consolidated register of school land transactions was located for this district. The count above was built by reading board and committee records site by site, and the district’s school-closures page still serves content from 2010¹.

The district’s Long Term Planning page describes the instrument that would carry this information in the future tense. When the results of Land Asset Management Studies identify opportunities to generate new revenues through the lease or disposition of surplus land holdings, the District “will develop” a Land Asset Strategy. No such document is linked, named, versioned or dated, and two indexed addresses for it return a 404⁷.

That is the practical consequence of a missing register. Six rows took a records search, and a reader wanting to check them has to repeat it.

What each row had to satisfy.

Three instruments govern the rows above.

• Policy 14, School Closure, adopted 24 September 2018 and revised 27 May 2026. Closure means a cessation of more than twelve months. Engagement runs at least 60 days, at least one public meeting is announced at least 14 days ahead, submissions are before the Board no later than 14 days before the decision, and the decision is made by School Closure Bylaw⁸.
• Policy 20, Disposal of Land or Improvements, adopted 24 September 2018 and amended 27 September 2021. Six steps, beginning with a title search and consultation and turning on a Board resolution declaring the property surplus, then a public request for proposals or tender, Minister approval with appraisals, and a Real Property Disposal By-law⁹.
• Ministerial Order M193/08, effective 3 September 2008. A board must not dispose of land by sale and transfer in fee simple, or by lease of ten years or more, unless the disposal is to another board or an independent school for educational purposes or is approved by the Minister¹⁰.

The Ministry’s policy page states that only in exceptional circumstances should a board consider permanently disposing of school property, and that property sold for non-educational and non-community use must go to public tender or another competitive bidding process¹¹. Read against the ledger, the ten-year record is consistent with that statement: one long-term lease, one sale of a subsurface interest, and no permanent disposal of a whole site.

What the count establishes, and what it does not.

It establishes what the records read contain: one completed long-term lease, one completed subsurface sale, two sites out of enrolling use with no instrument on either, one suspended consultation, and one pre-existing lease that produced a court ruling inside the window.

It does not establish that nothing else occurred, because with no register there is nothing to check a records search against. And it covers one district over one ten-year window, so it supports no statement about any other district or any longer period.

One register, one row per transaction, six fields.

One register, one row per transaction, six fields: the site, the instrument, the board decision dates, the consideration, the statutory route taken, and whether the site remained in enrolling use the day after closing. Published, dated, and amended when a by-law passes.

Everything in the table above already exists in a public document. What took a records search was finding the documents, not reading them. A register would move that work from every reader to the body that already holds the paper.

A register of that kind settles nothing that is properly a decision. Those remain the Board’s decisions and the Minister’s approvals, made by the people accountable for them, from a page anyone can check.

Further records read for this piece, and the arithmetic behind its figures, are set out in Sources.^121314156