West Vancouver teacher Todd Ablett’s commute to work would be the envy of many.
“If I have no traffic, I have an eight-minute commute,” says Ablett, who lives in Caulfield and heads up the mechatronics robotics academy at West Vancouver secondary. If there’s traffic, it’s more like 10 minutes.
Somewhat surprisingly, Ablett is less of an anomaly than many might believe.
While only 16 per cent of West Vancouver teachers live in the municipality, that number rises to 63 per cent when the entire North Shore – including North Vancouver and Bowen Island – are factored in.
“The majority of our staff actually live on the North Shore,” said Dave Eberwein, assistant superintendent for the school district.
The West Vancouver school district first decided to find out where teachers and support staff live earlier this spring, after the teachers union and the province reached a deal paving the way to the hiring of more teachers throughout the province.
Concerned by anecdotal reports that few teachers were living on the North Shore, and therefore might be tempted to leave if new jobs were posted closer to their homes, the human resources department surveyed the home addresses listed for employees.
The results were better than expected, with 41 per cent of staff living in North Vancouver, 16 per cent in West Vancouver and five per cent on Bowen Island. A handful of staff commute also from other nearby communities like Lions Bay, Britannia Beach, Squamish and Gibsons.
About 20 per cent come from Vancouver while six per cent live in Burnaby.
Relatively few come from areas farther afield like Pitt Meadows, Port Coquitlam and the Fraser Valley although two per cent do live in Surrey.
Eberwein said the results are interesting. “It was a question we hadn’t really explored before,” he said.
For Ablett, who has lived in West Vancouver for close to a decade, the decision to work closer to home was part of the reason he left the robotics program he’d started at Gladstone secondary in East Vancouver to start teaching in West Vancouver. “That’s worth about 200 hours a year,” he said.
But Ablett said commuting is still a fact of life for many teachers – as it is for other workers. For much of the time he taught in Vancouver, he commuted from Burnaby, he said.
Ablett guesses that school district staff living on the North Shore are likely those who “bought in” a number of years ago.
“My place in Caulfeild is worth a lot more than when I bought it,” he said.
More affordable options like smaller homes would help to change that, he said.
According to Ministry of Education statistics, the average age and income levels of teachers in West Vancouver are similar to those in other communities. The average age of a West Vancouver teacher is 43 and the average full-time salary is about $73,000, according to those statistics.
