Skip to content

Think about education in the future

School divisions and school-community councils are being asked to supply their input as to what they would like education to look like in the years to come.

School divisions and school-community councils are being asked to supply their input as to what they would like education to look like in the years to come.

This was discussed during the Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division’s board meeting last week.

The discussion arose as it was noted the Saskatchewan School Boards Association (SSBA) is leading a survey on the future of education.

As a part of their input to the survey, Holy Family is suggesting that each school community council could contribute their thoughts about the future of education. The school community councils are going to meet for a forum March 19, and the suggestion was to raise the topic at the forum.

“The committee has determined that each school division is to give feedback on what they think education’s future will be,” said director of education Gwen Keith.

She added that each trustee could talk about this with their local school community, particularly with their school community council.

Other stakeholders, such as the Saskatchewan Teachers Federation (STF), are also envisioning the future of education. They are holding a campaign across the province encouraging the public to voice their opinions about the state of education.

“We are creating a new set of priorities here. We’re doing that in addition to our whole Catholic distinctiveness piece,” said Keith. “We have to look at it through the eyes of the parents.”

In other school board business, Keith updated the board on the ongoing efforts to bring in a new province-wide student information system, called MySchoolSask. She noted some school divisions have indicated they will not be able to have it in place in time for the next school year in September, but Holy Family is on track to have it implemented with the training of staff ongoing.

About a third of the Holy Family office staff will be in training on the new information system over the February break.

“I’ll be honest with you, it’s (information system) got some challenges to it,” said Keith.

She noted that the Catholic school boards are each deciding what information should be put on the system in regards to Catholic education.

“We want to make sure this is smooth and seamless. We are one of 27 school divisions. We’re still moving forward as best we can,” she added.

Holy Family also marked Staff Appreciation Week with the production of a Holy Family cookbook, with a copy provided to every staff member and to the board of trustees. The cookbook, entitled Our Community of Story, was compiled with a short history of each of the school communities, and recipes provided from each staff person from throughout the school division with a comment or story about how they got the recipe, or what it’s meant to them.

“It’s an example of the culture of our school division that we can do these things together,” said Keith.

She said that special recipes often deal with the relationships one has with their loved ones.