Members of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division took part in the provincial education summit held in Saskatoon over the Oct. 13 weekend, as they looked at what K-12 education should be focusing on in the next decade in Saskatchewan.
Holy Family board chair Bruno Tuchscherer, along with director of education Gwen Keith, represented Holy Family, where some 65 organizations and boards had representatives, including from the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation and school boards across the province.
The summit narrowed the discussions down to eight different themes around education, said Tuchscherer, including grad requirements, an equitable and sustainable education system, early education, reconciliation with First Nations, school environment, mental health, deep learning and engaging and respectful relationships.
“The idea is we can get the SSBA, Health and Education ministries, the STF all working together towards the same goal,” said Tuchscherer, adding there was a lot of emphasis on First Nations issues.
The discussions were “very cordial, with no fighting,” he said, making for a very good two days of discussions.
He noted the teachers federation is going to be a big player in the coming months, as they are working on their own project about the renewal of education in Saskatchewan.
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In other school board business, Holy Family was asked by the Ministry of Education to reduce their operating line of credit amount. The trustees were told that school boards were asked to do this as the province now collects all property taxes for the funding of education, which was previously done by the school divisions, therefore the risk of non-payment of taxes is also removed for the school boards.
A total of 17 school boards around the province were requested to lower their line of credit, and Holy Family complied, reducing theirs from $3 million to $1 million. As the board was told, the school division never had to use their credit limit, so there would be no risk to the division by doing this.
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The new provincial student information data system has been renamed as MySchool Sask from USIS, and Holy Family is involved with 20 other school boards as they figure out what they need to do for all student information to be put onto one provincial database.
Keith noted just earlier the day of the board meeting, they had a conference call with the 20 other boards, which makes the process somewhat complicated as they move forward.
“It’s very complex to do decision-making over the phone with 20 other people,” said Keith, noting the Saskatchewan School Boards Association lawyer is very involved with the process as they figure out how to hand over the information for all of their students to a new company setting up the information system.
She also noted they are still using the information system by another company, Maplewood, which has been co-operating in this switch-over to a province-wide system. The one concern would be if discussions start on having a new report card system, but she said it seems most school divisions are not talking about implementing this at this point.
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With the new provincial contract agreed to for the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation, there was a discussion with the Holy Family teachers’ association at a liaison meeting held on Wednesday, and the reaction overall was positive, said Tuchscherer, noting that the teachers and school board are going through the fine details of the new contract to see how it applies at the local level.
“There are areas we don’t know about. I don’t think it’s going to cause too much problems,” he said, adding that one of the implications of the contract is determining what is defined as “teacher time”.
Keith noted they will have to have a discussion also with South East Cornerstone as to how or if this will impact how the two school divisions set their school year calendar, which in the last few years is a co-ordinated effort between the two divisions.
“What we’re doing is creating a clearcut template of what teacher time is, so principals aren’t caught in the middle,” said Keith.
