After more than two decades, Pemberton’s francophone community is set to get its own school building. A groundbreaking ceremony at the future school’s location between the Tiyata Village and Highway 99 was held on May 6.
“This is a huge win for students to keep their parents’ mother tongue and parents looking to pass their language on to the next generation without having to be in a predominantly francophone environment to do so,” said Laura Grefford, a board member of the Fédération des Parents Francophones de Colombie-Britannique (FPFCB).
Legal legwork before construction
While construction on the school itself has been in development for about five years, the origins of the new building date back closer to two decades.
École La Vallée was inaugurated in September 2004 with 24 students across kindergarten to Grade 7. It has grown to 82 students spread across four portables next to Signal Hill Elementary School.
The FPFCB and Conseil Scolaire Francophone de la Colombie-Britannique (CSF), also known as the Francophone Education Authority or School District 93 (SD93), had argued for years that the province underfunded French-language schools and failed to provide adequate facilities—particularly in rural areas like Pemberton, where francophone students were forced into a growing number of portables or other facilities across town.
Under Section 23 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a province or territory's French- or English-minority communities are guaranteed primary and secondary education in their mother tongue. The CSF argued Pemberton and other communities' growing francophone student populations merited their own standalone facilities.
“There’s a principle of equivalence in education,” said Marie-Pierre Lavoie, board chair of the CSF. “It’s about not having a school that’s too old or that we rent from someone. Our students already perform very well, but we want to grow with our students.”
The CSF and FPFCB launched a lawsuit against the province in June 2010, arguing the province had failed to provide equivalent educational services to francophone students.
In 2016, the B.C. Supreme Court delivered a partial victory to the CSF in a lengthy ruling agreeing French-language schools were underfunded, but that charter breaches were occasionally appropriate based on insufficient French student populations.
The CSF and FPFCB appealed the 2016 decision, which made its way to the Supreme Court of Canada.
In June 2020, the SCC ruled in favour of the CSF, affirming the right to comparable education for French-speaking students and placing a strong obligation on governments to actively support minority language education.
Work began in earnest on a new physical building in Pemberton in 2020. Details on the specs for the new school building were released in November 2020, and the CSF secured $66 million from the province for the construction of a new school building in March 2024.
Breaking ground
The three-storey, 4,000-square-metre school will be built behind Signal Hill Elementary, within the Tiyata Village.
The planned facility will accommodate 220 students, with the potential to expand by an additional 150 seats to meet future enrolment. Construction will use hybrid mass timber, aligning with the province’s emissions-reduction goals.
In addition to a basketball court, soccer field and gymnasium, the new school will offer French-language child care services. Grefford sees it as a way for younger kids and new families to integrate into the new school earlier than kindergarten.
“Very importantly, these children will be able to speak French outside of the home and build their French-speaking skills even more by integrating into the francophone community,” she said.
Lil’wat cultural chief Gélpcal Ashley Joseph, his cousin, and his wife—Heather Joseph, the Ucwalmícwts teacher at Signal Hill—commemorated the groundbreaking with a work song.
“Language is really exciting to us,” said Gélpcal. “To have it continue, have it flourish… and I think it’s really important to be supporting each other’s communities and each other’s children.”
Pemberton Mayor Mike Richman, whose kids attended the French-language program, marked the occasion by reflecting on the work that went into the new building.
“It's been a long road getting here,” he told Pique. “There's been a number of people involved from the beginning who have put in years and years of work to get here, and they should be very proud. There should be a lot of pride in this community to get to this point, the school will bring not only a lot of value to the francophone community here, but also to the greater community.”
Richman noted part of the hurdle was establishing a business case that Pemberton had the need for a new building specifically to accommodate francophone students. The current portables have the capacity to hold about 100 students, according to Lavoie, but the CSF projects ample growth in the years ahead.
“We’ve been growing ever since it opened as a small program, and then we are convinced that there’s going to be more students when the school is ready to open with the new building,” she said.
École La Vallée is a public school, just not a French immersion school. Unlike Signal Hill and Pemberton Secondary School, which reside in School District 48, the French school is part of SD93—the French language public school board for every French school in the province.
“A lot of times you have people think that the franc schools are private, but they are not,” said Grefford. “There’s a public francophone school district in the province, and it's wonderful that Pemberton is going to be able to offer a full-fledged francophone school right here in the village.”
Students who attend an SD93 school need to have at least one parent whose first language is French.
Construction on the new École La Vallée is scheduled to be completed in winter 2027.
