The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
As he reaches the end of his second year as superintendent of schools for the Flin Flon School Division, Blaine Veitch has a lot on his mind. How will the division deal with declining enrollments? How is education changing? What are the priorities? Those are a few of the areas the superintendent touched on during a one-on-one interview with The Reminder yesterday. * * * Reminder: What is the biggest challenge facing the Flin Flon School Division? Veitch: The biggest challenge right now is the declining enrollment in our community. Fewer people are having fewer children, which makes for less enrollment in our schools and less funding based on the number of students we have. Reminder: How do you see that impacting the division? Veitch: I think with any challenges, there are problems and there are opportunities. We're starting discussions with the community. (A public meeting will be held next week). We've had some discussions with administrators at the board level. No decisions have been made. The key for all of us is to continue to find ways to provide quality programs and excellence in education. Reminder: Would smaller schools hurt education? Veitch: There are benefits to having larger schools because you can have more resources with more kids. There are benefits to having smaller schools because of the community that you can develop more easily. Flin Flon has traditionally had different areas Ñ Birchview, Willowvale Ñ so people still connect into those smaller communities within Flin Flon. That's part of our culture as a community. See 'Changes' P.# Con't from P.# Reminder: Do you foresee a time when a school might have to be closed? Veitch: Well, that's a possibility. Right now, we're expecting 60 to 70 kids a year coming into the division. So if that was to continue over a 12-year span, you would have a division of about 800 students. So, in ten years time, if the trend continues, yeah, there's going to be huge challenges. We couldn't run five schools with 800 kids. But what's the future going to bring? When you look at the average age of the workforce at our prime employer, HBMS, you're probably looking at a lot of workers who are toward the later side of their careers, and their families are grown. If those workers are replaced with younger workers who have younger children or are going to start families, we may actually see a growth in the division in ten years, too. The future is hard to predict. Reminder: How is the division keeping up with changing student needs? Veitch: There's no doubt that the children of today are different than when I was a student. What we have tried to do is focus on individual needs as much as possible. So we're trying to help every student perform to their own individual potential. Are we perfect? No, but that's what we're striving towards. It's a learning curve for our staff as well, moving away from some of the traditional styles of teaching that they were taught. Reminder: Do you feel there is a teacher shortage? Veitch: The teacher shortage they predicted, we haven't seen. The only areas that there's been a bit of a shortage is in some of the specialty areas like French Immersion or perhaps higher level sciences. Those kinds of teachers are more difficult to find, but even in those areas we've had numbers of applications to look through. Reminder: There has for years been a feeling among some people that the former armoury, now home to Many Faces Education Centre, is no place for a school. Do you have concerns about the building? Veitch: The building is not perfect. It wasn't designed to be a school Ñ it's an armoury. I think, though, that a lot of any institution is not necessarily what facility you have as much as the attitude you have about your facility. So I think in some ways, having a facility such as we have for Many Faces is actually a way to help people work together even more closely Ñ "If we work together, things can even be better." Reminder: What changes to do you see coming in education in the next ten years? Veitch: I think we will see more attention paid to aboriginal cultures than in the past. We'll see ever increasing success of aboriginal children. I'm not sure how far the pendulum is going to swing towards the individual's rightsÉ how far do schools have to go to provide individualized education from the new piece of legislation that's coming out, and at what cost to the larger group? I think those will be some discussions that will come forward in the future. I also think that technology will continue to have an impact. I think the world will grow a lot smaller for our children. See 'Bullying' P.# Con't from P.# Reminder: Is bullying in the local schools improving? Veitch: My sense is it's getting better. We've worked very hard as a division to address that, and it's been an ongoing division issue for a number of years. And I think with the implementation of different programs, there's been improvements. Is it perfect? No, again, but I think that kids are more sensitive to each other.. Reminder: Would you agree that society's expectations on education have grown greatly over the years? Veitch: I guess part of the struggle for me is, I think. . . there's too many expectations on education. We have to be nurses and we have to provide medication and we have to be a nutritionist, we have to provide healthy food, we have to give breakfast programs, and we've got to provide counselling because of all the social issues. I think we're working to try and provide that balance (with education). Some people may argue that we're too far on one side or the other, but we try to look at the individual's needs as best we can and meet those needs with the resources we have.
