A team of educators, administrators, district staff and community partners (RCMP, Desert Sun Counseling staff and members from the MCFD and community Mental Health) attended the ERASE Bullying regional training in Kelowna on December 12th, 13th and 14th. Two days of the training was focused on building safe and caring school cultures and of course on preventing bullying. The third day focused on “Basic Threat Risk Assessment Training”. Our district shares the concerns of our communities about bullying and we are trying to implement many different programs in all of our schools to address bullying. We are also pleased to report that we have 12 Roots of Empathy programs in all of our elementary schools across the district. This program has shown to reduce levels of aggression and violence among schoolchildren while raising social emotional competence and increasing empathy.
The Early Development Instrument (EDI) process is currently underway. The EDI is a population-level research tool completed by kindergarten teachers across the province. It gathers information about children’s development in their early years, prior to Kindergarten. This tool measures developmental change or trends in populations of children and it is not used to understand individual children. It allows us to understand trends in child development that can help shape programs and policy as it provides us with a measure of the vulnerability of children as they enter our school system. This is important because to be vulnerable means that a child is at increased risk of difficulties in the school years and beyond. Unfortunately our district has been identified as one of the most “vulnerable districts” in the province. We are working hard to change this by creating toddler and infant daycare, pre-school partnerships, StrongStart Centres, Mother Goose programs and we have also just introduced our first Family Hub at Oliver Elementary School. It is the Board’s hope that in the years to come we will have a hub at every one of our elementary schools.
We are happy to report that our district has applied for two School Community Connections grants this year. One grant was for a $12,500 grant for upgrades to the new Oliver Family Hub. The second grant of $5,000 is to support the new Tuc-el-Nuit Elementary playground equipment. While we are happy to report that we have received approval-in-principle for these grants, we are still waiting for final approval. Our thanks to the Town of Oliver for their support in these initiatives.
Our grades 6 and 7 Hands-On Trades Program received a $4,000 Yes-2-It grant and we would like to thank Boyd Turnbull for doing a wonderful job in leading this program in the district. This program will ensure that all of our grades 6 and 7 students will be exposed to a variety of trades in their local secondary school.
We would like to urge all of our parents to participate in the 2012/2013 Satisfaction Survey. This survey will be administered in early 2013 to students in grades 4, 7, 10 and 12, their parents and all school staff. The electronic survey will be available to all schools from January 2 to April 30, 2013. Please be sure to let us know how we are meeting the needs of your children.
Our enrolment report indicates that our number of students has decreased by about 34 students since September of this year. This is a significant number of students – the equivalent of more than one class of students in our district. We have asked schools to indicate the reasons for students leaving and most of the families are moving to bigger cities in the valley or to Alberta for employment.
The Board approved the Superintendent’s Report on Achievement. We are very happy to report that our students reading and writing skills are very strong as indicated by our grade 4 and grade 7 FSA results as well as classroom assessments. This is especially significant because of the fact that we have a large percentage of our students arriving in Kindergarten more vulnerable according to the EDI; despite this our grade 4 and 7 students perform above the provincial average in both reading and writing. We are especially proud of our Aboriginal students who are performing way above the provincial Aboriginal student average (in some cases up to 21% higher). FSA results show our numeracy skills in grades 4 and 7 are also improving. We are concerned about our six year completion rate. For 2011/12 our completion rate was 70%, this is down from 73% for 2010/11. We’re now looking at individual students & trying to identify the barriers that they face in making them unable to graduate in 6 years from grade 8.
We would like to invite our parents and community members to Christmas festivities in all of our schools. Please contact your local school for details.
The Board would also like to thank both Marcus Toneatto and Cate Turner for their hard work and dedication to both SESS and SOSS over the last several years and wish them the best for their new positions in the new year.
Happy Holidays to everyone and the very best for the New Year.
Should you have any questions, please contact me at 250-498-1333.
Submitted by Marieze Tarr, ChairpersonSchool District No. 53 (Okanagan Similkameen)