There were a few brief items covered during the South East Cornerstone Public School Division’s (SECPSD) public meeting held in an online format on March 17.
SECPSD director of education Lynn Little explained a new procedure had recently been verified that could include the Indigenous practice of smudging. She said this was being done to honour commitments to Indigenous learning, and smudging was the affirmation of tradition for First Nations people as a collection from the Earth.
“There are various ways this is done and carried out and when it is, it can be done on school grounds,” she said, adding this was in compliance with the Ministry of Education guidelines.
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A few housekeeping matters were tended to during the second half of the meeting when Shelley Toth, the division’s superintendent of division services and chief financial officer, sought permission from the board to destroy a number of records such as tuition fees paid between 2000 and 2004, and other records now deemed unnecessary that dated as far back as 1987.
The motion to destroy these records was presented and passed unanimously.
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When discussing the COVID-19 pandemic, Little said, “We are not out of the woods yet,” but, she added, given the current local COVID rates and the trend in the last month, the decision had been made to have students in the division’s two largest schools, the Estevan Comprehensive School and Weyburn Comprehensive School, return to full-time attendance procedures as long as health and safety regulations surrounding the pandemic situation were observed.
The move to restrict student attendance in larger schools across the province had been put in place by the provincial government. It included schools with enrolment that exceeded 600 students. ECS and WCS had to resort to a system that allowed half the students to attend the high school campus one day, then take online courses the next day while the other half made their way into the actual classrooms.
As per the response and safety plan, it is possible that the schools like others across the system and province will move by class or school to other levels dependent on COVID rates in individual schools and communities.
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The SECPSD board members have a busy schedule posted for the remainder of March and well into April.
On March 28 and 29 it is expected they will be attending, in a virtual format, the National Congress on Rural Education in Canada.
On April 6, again in a virtual setting, they will be focused on the release of the provincial budget to see what is in store for the education sector in terms of funding support for the next fiscal year. On April 15 and 16, there will be a Saskatchewan School Board Association assembly which will be followed by their next regular committee-of-the-whole meeting on the morning of April 21 followed by the regular monthly public meeting in the afternoon.
It has not been determined yet as to whether this meeting will be in a physical attendance format in the school division’s head office in Weyburn, or in an online version that has been the practise for the past four months. That will be dependent of provincial guidelines.
