Following are some highlights of items discussed at the December 12, 2018
School District No. 53 Board of Education meeting.

10 Take-A-Risk grants were approved in the district for this year. These grants are provided to teams of teachers to work collaboratively planning and assessing new initiatives they are trying in their classrooms. These initiatives include new ways of organizing for learning in tech education to planning and assessing core competencies in secondary classrooms to academic electives. Reporting out on these initiatives will occur at the Board’s Education Committee meeting in June.

SOGI leads in each school met with the Director of Learning and Inquiry to share and plan how they can move forward creating safe and inclusive schools for all. Two parent resource videos were viewed and discussed. One parent resource was aimed at parents of elementary students and the other parent resource was aimed at parents of secondary students.

Trustees discussed the signing of an updated memorandum of understanding between BCSTA and the Ministry of Education as part of BCSTA’s academy program. The MOU acts as an agreement on collaboration, cooperation and communication between both organizations. The first memorandum of understanding between BCSTA and the Ministry of Education was signed almost 20 years ago by Past-President Gordon Comeau and his board of directors who saw a need to better define the BCSTA’s relationship with the B.C. government.

Trustees discussed their personal highlights of the BCSTA academy that they attended at the end of November. Certainly, with such a large turnover of trustees in this electoral cycle, there was a lot of information that was given and a great deal of context was imparted to all trustees.

At the meeting, the board directed the chair to write a letter to the Minister of Education regarding the possible changing of the funding formula and specifically the Rural Education Enhancement Fund (REEF) funding portion of our yearly allocation. The letter has been written and sent as directed. We expect to see the report from the independent panel released before the Christmas break.

I would like to wish everyone a safe and very happy holiday season and all the best for the new year. See you all in 2019!

Rob Zandee, Chairperson
School District No. 53 (Okanagan Similkameen)