A report to Living Sky School Division board members last week by Facilities Manager Brian Bossaer FAME has prompted the board to seek more face-to-face time with the area's politicians.
Bossaer was at least week's meeting to update the board on the system by which the care and upkeep of the schools and other buildings throughout the division are tracked. Living Sky School Division has been using infrastructure management software entitled FAME since the fall of 2007. FAME documents all maintenance and capital work pending, completed and underway throughout the region's facilities, as well as all service requests that come in to central office.
Even the purchase of janitorial supplies has been added to FAME, in order to streamline the process and ensure only appropriate products are being used.
Regular maintenance is also tracked and prompted through FAME, which, in the big picture, said Bossaer, will result in fewer service requests and add to facility longevity.
The software was developed by FAME Asset Management Solutions, a 15-year-old international firm with head office in Calgary, Alta., providing infrastructure asset management solutions to over 4,000 clients in both the public and private sector. FAME assists clients with their facility asset management planning, operations, analysis, reporting, infrastructure auditing and knowledge management technology.
What FAME can't help Living Sky School Division with, however, is the process by which funding requests are processed at the provincial level.
Bossaer quoted an example of the division going ahead with three urgently needed accessibility projects, then being denied funding because they were completed before the request was processed.
He also noted the division's "top 20 worst roofs" list, as compiled by outside experts, shows if only $1 million of the approximately $5 million being requested for roof repair and replacement was approved, even the worst of the remaining roofs would be good for another two or three years.
Nor can FAME's efficiency help get the $356,000 needed to put fall arrest equipment on roofs division-wide.
All the principals and caretakers have taken the fall awareness training, he said, and all the division's trades people have had fall protection training, and wear safety harnesses when on any division roof. However, he said, the division can only ask employees to work on a roof if they feel comfortable doing so. They are never forced to do so, he said, because the lack of fall arrest installations. Because funding has not yet being approved, the division isn't really supposed to have staff on the roof at all.
As the facilities representative on the executive of the Saskatchewan Association of School Business Officials (SASBO), Bossaer hopes to help put pressure on the provincial government for needed funding.
Living Sky and its senior staff are all well known to the Ministry of Education for their persistence, he added.
"We're all well known for putting a foot in the door," he said.
Board members applauded Bossaer, his team of assistant facilities managers Harley Collins and Al Highton, and their staff, following Bossaer's report. Chairman Ken Arsenault said Living Sky is well known throughout the province for its well maintained facilities.
In order to maintain that reputation, board members agreed they should seek more face-to-face time with the various Members of the Legislature representing areas within the division with a view to making them aware of the projects which need immediate, and in some cases, emergency, funding.
Conditions such as leaking roofs, lack of accessibility and safety issues should be pointed out directly to politicians - ideally by meeting with the politicians at the sites themselves if necessary, they said.
Board member Glenn Wouters said such issues as accessibility are clearly the government's, not the school division's, responsibility.
"We need those dollars for the classrooms," he said.
