There is a river of rhetoric spewing from Premier Gordon Campbell and Education Minister Margaret MacDiarmid these days. The sound bites being flushed out of Victoria invariably paint a picture of too many empty spaces being a key source of Vancouver's budget issues.

The conclusion the provincial government wants the public to reach is that closing a few schools would solve the budget problems Vancouver and other boards face. If only this were true, boards would have relatively easy decisions to make.

On April 13 the Vancouver Board of Education sent a letter to MacDiarmid offering a mini course in basic math:

Prior to Easter, you stated there are 10,000 empty seats in Vancouver. Last week, you revised the number down to 7,000 empty seats. Neither figure is correct.

We've done our own review of the numbers, and we currently estimate our district-wide net surplus spaces to be 4,682. If we include portable classroom capacity in the total, we have a net surplus of 5,796 spaces. These figures are based on district enrolment as of Sept. 30, 2009. We have also assumed that all Kindergarten classrooms will become full-day Kindergarten classes with the implementation of full-day Kindergarten.

Since 2006 when the last inventory was completed, Vancouver has reduced available spaces by decommissioning portable classrooms. School reconstruction for the provincial seismic safety program is another opportunity to reduce classroom capacity in specific schools.

Without any demographic changes, new education programs the Ministry has ordered districts to implement or plan for, including full-day Kindergarten and early-education pre-K, will move the Vancouver district from a surplus capacity position to having a deficit of 715 seats based on current projections.

Unsurprisingly, neither the Minister nor Campbell mention that Vancouver and other districts are facing space shortfalls in the foreseeable future. Closing a few schools on a temporary basis will net a small savings to the board, but will not close the funding gap forced upon the district by Minister MacDiarmid and her boss.

More to the point what has been left unsaid by the Minister is that Victoria won't even permit a permanent closure and sale of any school by the Vancouver Board of Education.

Why? Because they know those spaces will be needed in the near future.