SD63 Saanich School District

What the district covers

SD63 Saanich serves Central Saanich, North Saanich, Sidney and part of Saanich. As elsewhere, the boundary is the district’s to publish and does not follow municipal lines exactly.

Rural addresses and transport

On the Peninsula the catchment school can be a meaningful distance from the property. Whether busing is provided, on what routes and subject to what eligibility, is a district policy question and is worth confirming before purchase for anyone buying rurally with school-age children.

Confirming an address

Use the district’s official locator with the full civic address. Programs of choice are separate from catchment and have their own admission processes.

SD63 Saanich in figures, 2025/2026

The Ministry lists 14 public schools in SD63 Saanich in our data: 8 elementary, 3 middle and 3 secondary. They sit in Central Saanich, North Saanich, Saanich, Sidney. 4 of them list a French immersion programme. Neighbourhood-school enrolment was 6,928 in 2025/2026, up2% from 6,822 in 2017/2018 (our calculation from the Ministry's counts).

Secondary schools: Claremont Secondary (Saanich); Parkland Secondary (North Saanich); Stelly's Secondary (Central Saanich). This is a list, not a ranking, and it says nothing about which school serves a given address.

What the numbers say about SD63

SD63's headline enrolment rose sharply, but not in its neighbourhood schools. Those were close to flat, 6,822 students in 2017/2018 and 6,928 in 2025/2026. The growth is in the district's provincial online learning school, which went from 1,396 to 3,306 students over the same period and now serves learners well beyond the Peninsula. For a family buying here, the neighbourhood figure is the relevant one.

The online school is South Island Distance Education School. In 2025/2026 it accounted for about 32% of every student the Ministry counts in SD63 (our calculation from the Ministry's counts). That matters whenever you read a district-wide SD63 statistic: totals and other all-school figures published for the district include those online learners, so they describe a different student body from the Peninsula's neighbourhood schools. Look for figures reported for the individual school instead.

The neighbourhood schools took the same pandemic-year dip as the rest of the region, losing 447 students in 2020/21, and were back to their earlier level by 2023/24.

SD63 covers the Saanich Peninsula (Central Saanich, North Saanich and Sidney) and the northern part of Saanich. There is no public secondary school inside Sidney: Parkland Secondary is in North Saanich, Stelly's in Central Saanich and Claremont in Saanich.

Of the district's 14 neighbourhood schools, 5 are in Saanich, 4 in Central Saanich, 4 in North Saanich and 1 in Sidney, so a Sidney family with a secondary-school student should expect a daily trip out of town. The district's address locator is run through a third-party service, Baragar, rather than on the district's own site; the link below goes straight to it.

To confirm the catchment school for a specific address, use the district's own school locator.

Sources, checked 24 September 2026

• B.C. Ministry of Education and Child Care: Student Headcount by Grade, 2017/18 to 2025/26
• B.C. Ministry of Education and Child Care: BC Schools K-12 directory and programme indicators
• SD63: Parkland Secondary (read 24 Sep 2026)

Before you rely on any of this

This is general information about how things work in British Columbia, not advice about your situation, and it is not legal, tax or financial advice. Rules, thresholds and programs change. Anything that turns on a current figure or a statutory period should be confirmed against the primary source or with the relevant professional before you act on it.