The Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division wants a meeting with Minister of Education Gordon Wyant regarding an undisclosed cost for the Unified Student Information System (USIS), which all school divisions in the province will need to join over the next few years.
Director of education Gwen Keith noted that the government told the school divisions there would be a cost for the USIS, that had not been mentioned before, of $33,250, plus a charge per student, “which is an unforeseen cost,” she said.
USIS will be a province-wide information database on every student in every school division, and replaces the information systems that school divisions are currently using.
The cost was mentioned after the provincial budget and school division budget was set, and had not been accounted for, so the school division wants to appeal to Wyant.
“We want to meet with the minister. We just don’t think this is fair for us as a small school division to have a base cost when we don’t have any high schools. We just don’t think that’s fair,” said Keith. “We may or may not be successful. We had this presented orally to us by a conference call.”
She added that USIS may start for Holy Family by November, rather than next April as they were originally told.
“We want to sit down with them to see how we can be pro-active,” said Keith.
“I think it’s too bad there was no discussion as to what the cost is going to be. We were just told, after the budget is done,” said board chair Bruno Tuchscherer. “It’s not a very good co-operation by the ministry.”
He noted this may be a cost around $50,000 to Holy Family, which now they will have to try and find in their budget, which they had already finalized, in addition to what they have to pay to Maplewood for operating their current student information system until it’s replaced by USIS.
In other school board business, Holy Family was provided a report from the Pan-Canadian Assessment Program, which assessed where students across Canada are at for reading, math and science.
Keith said in math and science, all provinces except Ontario showed improvement in their assessment levels.
“The education sector has placed a heavy emphasis on math next year,” she said, referring to Saskatchewan, noting that students from St. Michael School in Weyburn and St. Augustine School in Wilcox took part in this national assessment in 2016.
A more complete and thorough assessment of how Holy Family students are doing academically will available for the board to see this October, after the current school year wraps up at the end of June.
