Â鶹´«Ã½AV
Successful achievements for the Cornerstone School Division School Community Councils (SCC) were highlighted during the monthly board meeting on Thursday. Data presentation on surveys completed by SCCs across the province were compared to those in Cornerstone.
All public schools in the Cornerstone School Division have School Community Councils in place, in addition to having their policies in place, board-approved constitutions and codes of conduct.
The SCC involvement in the school learning improvement plan are higher in Cornerstone when compared to the provincial average.
"This speaks to the work that Kelly Hilkewich did with our schools back in his previous assignment as a coordinator of services to the school division," said Marc Casavant, director of education for Cornerstone. "Certainly Hilkewich did an excellent job implementing a lot of the things that we saw in the data
presentation."
According to the survey, the most common support needed by the SCCs are understanding their roles and improved communications. There is still a challenge of moving away from a fundraising mind-set and a lack of leadership capacity.
"We also noticed that there are some things we could get better at, and this board is about using data to drive decisions that they make," said Casavant. "One of the things that jumped out at me is we have a number of First Nations students attending our schools, however we don't have any First Nations representatives on some of
our school community councils."
Successful strategies reported from SCCs include principals serving as members, division-provided workshops, and web pages provided by the Ministry of Education for SCCs.
Three naming rights for the Triple C Centre were approved by the Cornerstone board, after being approved by the Comprehensive School Community Council. These are the Weyburn Security Balcony, the Helen Davidson Choir Room and the Weyburn Credit Union Stage.
"We are looking forward to the completion of the Triple C Centre because then the community can begin to use it," said trustee Bryan Wilson. "There is still the naming rights for the commons that is being worked with, and the announcement of the naming rights of the overall Centre, which has not yet been made public."
The board nominated the Response to Intervention (RTI) model in the Cornerstone School Division for the Premier's Award, which will be presented at the fall Saskatchewan Schools Boards Association annual general meeting and convention.
"The senior leadership team felt quite strongly that the Response to Intervention model is something that we are quite proud of, and it is serving our students in our school division well," said Casavant. "The model is premised on supports that are put in place for students in three different pyramids."
Each pyramid in the model offers different levels of support provided to students. Each one of the Cornerstone schools has a learning support and Response to Intervention teacher, with some smaller schools being the same teacher.
In the last year, Cornerstone has seen an increase of 81 students across their division, according to enrollment numbers at each of their schools taken on Sept. 6. "Two years in a row we have gained significant numbers of students in our school division. It speaks to the economic growth in the area, and in our view the
quality of programming that we provide in our school division," said Casavant.
