Board of Education Report January 25, 2017
Over the last few weeks, the Provincial Government has announced interim funding of $50 million relating to the recent Supreme Court Decision between the Province of British Columbia and the BCTF. As a result of the announcement, School District No. 53 has received $246,774 under this agreement for additional FTE teachers to address priority measures identified in schools with regard to support services to students, class size and composition.
A total of 4.4 FTE teachers will be hired across the district this month.
As part of the Ministry of Education’s review of rural education practices and funding, Board Chair Marieze Tarr and district staff recently met with MLA Linda Larson, who is also serving as the Parliamentary Secretary for Rural Education. MLA Larson is gathering information from rural districts throughout the province. There will be hosted regional meetings in the upcoming weeks with an open house to start the meeting followed by a facilitated session to review key themes they have heard so far, and discuss possible steps for moving forward.
Further information can be found at the following link: http://engage.gov.bc.ca/ruraleducation
Finally, the district applied for and received a Shoulder Tapper grant in the amount of $17,500 from the Ministry of Education for the 2016/17 school year. The focus area of this grant is related to increasing capacity and careers awareness for our students in the area of technology. This grant will be used in areas such as purchasing a CNC Router that will be shared between schools to increase awareness of technology in wood working, offering CADD (computer aided design) programs at all of our secondary schools, and in collaboration with Accelerate Okanagan, touring students to various tech-related firms in the valley to help students gain awareness of the career possibilities in this growing sector. In the future, the district hopes to investigate the possibility of starting a technology-related academy in our district. If we can get students and teachers interested in exploring the tech sector, we should see more students from our district enter into this field.
Should you have any questions, please contact me at 250-498-7439.
Submitted by Rob Zandee, Vice Chairperson
School District No. 53 (Okanagan Similkameen)