Proposed Yaletown pre-school unique in every way: It's the planned rooftop playground that makes city hall balk
The Vancouver Sun
26 Oct 2006
By: Pete McMartin

EXCERPT

For over a decade now, Natacha Beim's idea has been to build a school of higher learning in Vancouver.

About, oh, five storeys high....

As Beim's website reads, the toddlers would be instructed "in areas such as mathematics, reading, writing, drama, science, visual arts, music, yoga and many more."

At that age, I was still having difficulty learning how to unscrew my Oreo cookies, but Beim, who taught kindergarten in Europe, said the junior kindergarten model is popular there, where it is seen more as prep school than pre-school. It's a head start for the diaper set. ...

As it turns out -- and I'll get to that later -- she opened her first school not in Vancouver, but in West Vancouver.

Happily, there the fabled gene pool and parents' pockets were deep enough to support a school such as Beim's....

Price?

About $1,250 a month for five days a week....

Beim, however, hasn't had the same luck in Vancouver, where she originally wanted to build a school....

But the city, she said, insisted the playground be on the same floor as classrooms, which, Beim said, could not be done. There wasn't enough floor space.

It rejected her proposal on that basis.

"Stringent guidelines for licensing child care facilities are important. But surely these guidelines should be sensitive to changing local geography and real estate conditions.

... After some TV coverage a couple of weeks ago, Beim was summoned to city hall Wednesday for a noon-hour meeting with Mayor Sam Sullivan....

It'll be up to the city to decide if it gets off the ground.