NORTHEAST — Every school year has new changes, these are some of the ones you can expect.
During the fourth week of August, the North East School Division is focusing on teacher orientation, followed by the school admin planning days, and improvement planning.
As part of the improvement planning, the school division this year will be working on collecting data about how many students are reading at the expected grade level for Grades 1, 2 and 3. The division is also determining how many of its students in various grades are writing at grade level, with the results to be sent to the province.
“Writing will be the first reporting out,” Rempel said. “We see that data from the ministry and start working on improving those results over the course of this school year, and we’re going to have groups of teachers come together to do professional community learning work.”
In 2019 they will start working on improving student achievement in mathematics.
The school division has a normal changeover in staff, about 12 to 22 staff members.
“We’ve got a new superintendent of school operations, Stacy Lair is her name,” said Don Rempel, the division’s director of education. “She was previously vice-principal at Tisdale Elementary School. We’re got a couple of new principals in the system as well, and a number of new teachers coming on.”
The new vice-principal of Tisdale Elementary will be Desirea Binning, the former principal of Arborfield School. The new principal there will be Dallas Thiessen.
This isn’t an unusual amount of staff changes, according to Rempel.
“We have about 10 to 20 teachers retire on any given year, within the average range their last year,” Rempel said. “Our enrollments are declining slightly so we have one or two fewer teachers each year because we have less students across the entire school division as well.”
For now, students can look forward to a new school year.
