Mount Cheam Christian School

Getting to Little Mountain means climbing. The neighborhood sits on the slopes of Mount Shannon, northeast of downtown, with a block of forest in the middle and roughly 1,170 residents, the fewest in the city. Detached houses on the hillsides, the Little Mountain Stairs, and a set of lookouts that are the reason much of the rest of the city ever comes up here. It is an unusual place to find an institution of any size, since there is very little commercial or civic space anywhere on it.

Mount Cheam Christian School sits in that neighborhood, which tells you something about how it is used. A school up a hill in a small residential pocket is not drawing on passing trade; it is drawing families who have decided on it and will drive. That is the normal condition for independent schooling in Chilliwack. The city has several private and faith-based schools, a number of them with roots in the Mennonite and Reformed communities that settled Yarrow and Greendale, and they draw from across the municipality rather than from a catchment.

What is known is thin: a name, a category, a neighborhood and a postal code. No phone number, website or street address is attached, which for a school is a bigger gap than it would be for a shop. Grades offered, admissions process, denominational affiliation and fees are all things a parent would have to establish directly, and between them they are more or less the whole decision.