[溫哥華本地新聞] Woodlands School will be torn down today waiting, today, close, still, being

tiffiant

Woodlands School will be torn down todayHundreds of victims still waiting for compensationJohn Ackermann/Renee Bernard
Oct 18, 2011 07:33:21 AM

NEW WESTMINSTER (NEWS1130) - The 133-year-old centre block tower of the old Woodlands School in New Westminster is being torn down today.  

One survivor hopes it can help close the door on a painful past.  "I want to leave the past and move on into the future so we won't remember that part of the history ever again," says Richard McDonald.

He was one of many who witnessed abuse at the former institution for children with developmental problems and even now he has a hard time talking about it.  "I've seen a lot of abuse, too much to mention it."

McDonald is now an advocate with the People First Society of BC and he's happy to see the last of Woodlands being demolished.  "People keep asking me, 'How come that tower is not down?'  And so I said, 'It's going to come down, and we're going to live in the future, we're not going to live in the past.'"

Jane Dyson of the BC Coalition of People with Disabilities says they applaud its demise.  "It symbolizes so much terror, and heartbreak, and hurt," she says, adding she feels compensation to the victims has fallen short.

McDonald continues the fight for victim compensation.  He wants everyone to get their fair share and not just those who left the facility before August 1, 1974, when the laws were changed allowing victims to sue the provincial government.

Many victims believe the province is stalling on payments for those who are eligible for compensation.

"[The compensation] is only for people that were there after August 1, 1974, so you still have a few hundred people who suffered the same abuse, who are not eligible to have their abuse recognized," says Dyson.

Woodlands was a school where hundreds of people claim they were abused, both sexually and physically.  It was closed in 1996, but before that it served as a psychiatric hospital in the late 1800s and later as a facility for children with developmental disorders.

tiffiant