School trustees will consider potential population decline, ways to engage dropouts and added learning options as they chart a course for Flin Flon education for the next four years.
Those and other topics surfaced Tuesday evening as a small but engaged group of residents offered input at a community forum to guide the school board’s new strategic plan.
Trustee Murray Skeavington, board chairman, said the board will take into account Hudbay’s recent announcement that 777 mine is due to close around 2020 with no Flin Flon area mine in line yet to replace it.
“If it doesn’t happen, then you’re okay. If it does, you have a plan in place,” he told the forum, held at the Hapnot Collegiate theatre.
Skeavington was responding to Ken Pawlachuk, a city councillor who joined about two dozen other residents, including nine school division trustees and administrators, at the forum.
“To me a lot of people don’t want to talk about it, but to me quite a few people are going to be gone here in three to five years,” Pawlachuk told the forum. “I don’t know if the city has a plan. I can only speak for myself. I haven’t seen it yet.”
He said some city councillors are trying to promote a partnership with the school board – “because we don’t have one now” – and other communities and organizations given that “we’re all in the same boat, basically.”
Pawlachuk said council and the school board missed an opportunity to lobby for a northern trades training centre announced by the provincial government last fall. The centre went to Thompson.
In terms of Flin Flon’s future, Trustee Tim Davis countered Pawlachuk’s outlook.
“My grandpa came up in 1929 and he was told he had five years [of work],” said Davis.
“Tim, that might have worked 50 years ago, but do you think there’s going to be something in five years?” asked Pawlachuk.
“I don’t know,” Davis replied.
Skeavington said there “has been no discussion at all, ever” of closing another school building.
With total enrollment under 1,000 students, he agreed it makes sense to continue with four schools but added, “We’re probably at the bottom line of what would get looked at.”
Trustee Angela Simpson said a lower enrollment has meant more space for students, giving them “better tools that they never had before.” She mentioned larger labs and “more opportunities in the tech rooms.”
That had Colleen McKee, a parent, former trustee and current city councillor, urging the board to at least consider school closures if circumstances warrant.
“Even though yes, Angie, we have cushy labs and we have all the space that we need, we have to be realistic,” she said. “We’re heating those buildings, we’re manning those buildings, they have to be maintained – all of those costs come into play.”
If the grant in lieu of taxes that Hudbay pays to the municipality and school division is ever “downsized,” McKee said, “that’s going to affect everyone as well.”
While the board cannot close a school without provincial permission, she said that when there are “extenuating circumstances like the ones that we might be faced with, I think it’s worth the discussion, I really do.
“I don’t think we should be Debbie Downer here…but I think we have to be realistic. I think there probably will be a community downsize. Quite frankly…I think we’re going to be okay. I think there’s enough creative, dynamic, extraordinary people here that I think the community’s going to be okay, but at the same time I think that there’s a bit of realism that has to be injected there and we all have to face it. That’s just my opinion.”
Grad rates
Discussion turned to the ongoing graduation-rate gap between aboriginal and non-aboriginal students.
Manitoba-wide statistics consistently show 50 to 60 per cent of aboriginal students graduate high school in the standard four years compared to upwards of 90 per cent, or more, of their non-aboriginal peers.
Asked how Flin Flon is doing in this regard, Superintendent Blaine Veitch said his division’s figures are similar to the provincial numbers.
Assistant superintendent Dean Grove spoke of staff and initiatives to support aboriginal students, including a cultural advisor, learning programs and programming involving Cree at Ruth Betts Community School.
“A lot of what they’re doing is trying to break down some of the perceptions that people have around regular school situations and get people into the buildings,” he said, “[and] trying to build relationships that way with the families and look at the roadblocks that people may have in terms of getting to school, getting to school regularly, being successful at school and working through those.”
All students receive resource interventions when required to help them reach academic goals, Grove said.
Dropouts
Even though Manitoba law requires students to stay in school until they are 18, Skeavington said it can be a challenge to ensure that happens.
The division works with about 60 students who are not consistently in school. Veitch said that number has held fairly steady over time, though there are now likely more students on the younger end of the age spectrum.
“It’s maybe a little easier to understand a 16-year-old that doesn’t want to come to school,” he said. “I’m still trying to get my head around why an 11-year-old doesn’t want to come.”
Veitch said some of those students might not enroll in school until they are 19 or 20 years old and realize the value of an education.
He said the division has committed to working with those students in the hope they will choose school, and while some benefits are materializing, it is a difficult task.
Simpson, the veteran trustee, said she hates suspending students because sometimes if they are out of school for a period of time, they do not return.
She stressed the need to consider how to help students “that aren’t able to help themselves at home for whatever the reasons are.”
No daycare
Some outside the division have suggested a school-based daycare as a way of increasing attendance, helping ensure single parents can graduate.
While the previous board voted in 2013 to discuss that concept at the committee level, nothing materialized.
“It hasn’t been discussed in two years,” Skeavington said at the forum.
If the division were to accept government funding for a daycare, he said, that daycare could not be removed.
Should the division face a situation of having to expand or downsize, Skeavington added, “We could see ourselves getting painted into a corner.”
Help students
Trustees discussed new ways to assist students in terms of their mental wellbeing and future career options.
Skeavington said the board is investigating a potential partnership with the Northern Health Region to offer psychological testing to students.
In terms of career preparation, Skeavington spoke of plans to offer 10-week sessions in fields such as welding and plumbing so high school students can learn whether a trade is for them.
He said the division wants to introduce students to trades at a younger age so they can perhaps leave school with level 1 certification and have a leg up on their chosen occupation.
Lunch time
The lunch program at École McIsaac School proved a contentious topic, with trustees asked why parents must pay for their children to eat pre-packed lunches at the school.
McIsaac’s Parent Advisory Council (PAC) currently runs the lunch program, charging fees to parents to cover expenses.
Skeavington said PAC took on the program because parents wanted the service and the division had no time to operate it.
With PAC now planning to give up the program, he said either the school will take it over or it will be dropped. He offered no prediction on what will happen.
“It is something that’s at the board’s attention right now and it’s something that we’re definitely actively looking into,” added Trustee Amy Sapergia-Green.
Bullying
Another parent’s question related to misbehaviour at McIsaac and information from the school indicating it has a “no-tolerance” policy toward bullying.
Two questions followed: Why are bullying incidents not handled in a uniform way and how can there truly be no tolerance of this behaviour?
Veitch replied that he himself does not use the term “no tolerance” because that would be pretty hard to stick to.
“You try to work with each situation as the details are,” he said. “Of course we’re trying to prevent bullying, and if bullying occurs you’re trying to deal with the bullying and the victim. I guess it’s so case-specific that maybe that’s why you see some differences as [to how] it’s handled.”
Praise
While the board heard ways the school system can potentially improve, trustees also received, and made, observations about what is going right in the classroom.
“To be honest, I think this division does do phenomenal,” McKee, the city councillor, told the forum. “When I see the kids that come out of this division and out of this school system, and the things that they’ve gone on to do, it’s really incredible.”
Another parent praised the quality of teachers within the division, a sentiment echoed by Simpson.
“I think we have an incredible group of teachers, I think we have strong administrators and I think our kids are really trying hard,” said the trustee.
