Trustee candidate brings public-sector and international experience to Langley City race

Laura Wierenga has spent her career helping large organizations make better decisions with limited public funds. She now wants to apply that experience to Langley City’s public schools. Before becoming a stay-at-home parent, she worked on the City of Vancouver’s strategic planning and project management team, handling complex initiatives. Her team built the Empty Homes Tax from the ground up, and she was the first project manager from her team assigned to the emergency operations centre when COVID-19 hit in 2020.

Wierenga studied international business in France and the Netherlands, where she saw how space-constrained cities find creative ways to add school capacity. Langley City does not have much open land for a new school, she said. With SkyTrain coming and more growth ahead, she believes the city needs to plan creative ways to add capacity now instead of reacting later.

She decided to run as an independent after the previous two elections, when Langley City school board seats went uncontested or were won by candidates who lived outside the city. “If you don’t live where the schools are, you don’t see the problems firsthand,” she said. Public schools deserve someone who knows how to get the right resources to the right place and will push to make it happen, she added.

The issue is personal for Wierenga. She said inadequate classrooms and inconsistent staffing by teachers and support staff could create gaps in children’s learning that may not be possible to fix later.

Wierenga previously served on Langley City’s citizens’ assembly and volunteers with local parent-and-tot programs. If elected, she said she intends to be present in schools, engage with staff and families, and bring what she hears back to the board. That, she said, is how resources can be directed to where they are genuinely needed: in the community.