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ECS is gearing up for a milestone year

The Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The main activities are slated to take place next spring, however, the preparations have already started.
ECS pic

The Estevan Comprehensive School (ECS) is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The main activities are slated to take place next spring, however, the preparations have already started.

ECS principal Pat Jeannot said the student representative council (SRC) is working on it. Later the school will put up a call out inviting the community members to join the committee and come up with a big celebration to happen sometime around May.

“We have a few ideas that would work out best if we just did it towards the end of the year,” said Jeannot.

The ECS had a pretty good start-up so far, with 772 students enrolled. The numbers will be finalized at the end of September, but so far they are up from the projected 725. Jeannot explained why this could be the case.

“I found since I’ve been in Estevan here, that’s pretty typical in the community of this size that we draw from a fairly large area, as the economy, the jobs that are available, people move in and out of the community, so it’s really fluid that way.” 

The school also has new additions to their staff. New teachers Trevor Gordon, Michelle Wallace and Jennifer Von Sprecken joined the team this year. ECS also has a new intern Amy Chapman.

Gordon taught in Stoughton last year and will be covering for another teacher who is currently on maternity leave. Von Sprecken is from Estevan, and Wallace came to the Energy City from Regina, where she was teaching last year.

This year ECS also started a number of new courses and continued with several that were offered last year. They continue to offer the sports medicine course. They also added the leadership 30 class and emergency services response class to the curriculum. These classes were added to the regular core and multiple electives the school was offering before.

Jeannot also said there are a couple of other new classes that ECS is looking at for the future.

And so far the school has started exploring the capabilities of the new welding machine they purchased at the end of last year with the community support.

“The CNC (computer numerical control) machine … wouldn’t have been possible to pick up without the multiple donors from around our community, so we plan on doing a little celebration to have those donors in,” said Jeannot.

Teacher Mark Kroeker has it up and running, and the school hopes to start seeing some projects coming out of the shop in the near future.

“Pretty exciting for our students to be able to use something that is industry standard, and to get trained on that to go right into the field to be able to use the machines that we know are out there,” said Jeannot.

The other school activities are also in a full swing. The football team started practising a few weeks ago and has already had two games (for more on Elecs last football game see A14). Volleyball and soccer are up and running. The astronomy club is planning lots of various activities for the students.

The school has its pep rally coming up soon and they are also sending the SRC members to a student leadership conference this week.

The ECS also continues with their flex or flexible learning time that they started up last year adding a few tweaks to it.

“We’ve got flex time during homeroom, so each student is connected to a teacher advocate each and every day. That’s the time when kids can get extra homework done or do some career planning with an advocate in our school,” said Jeannot.

He also noted that if anyone is willing to join the school committee council they are encouraged to contact the school.

“They are an important part of our in-school improvement planning.”

Now the school is in the process of significantly upgrading and modernizing the cafeteria, making it more attractive for students.