A Tisdale-based school trustee is concerned about the status of the student representative councils at North East School Division schools.
Depending on the school, some of the councils are elected, some are appointed after an application process, some have a mixed system where some positions are appointed and elected, and some are filled by whoever wants a position. Most of the schools in the division don’t hold elections for the positions.
“I was shocked by the report of the state of our student representative councils,” said Richard Hildebrand about a report that came from discussions between students and trustees about their thoughts about local schools. The report was presented at the June 20 school board meeting.
Hildebrand said he believed one of the purposes of public education in a democracy is to instill the principles of democracy through elected councils.
“Is it, perhaps, any wonder why our millennials in Canada don’t vote? Where we’ve got a participation rate of barely above a majority in our provincial and national elections.”
The Tisdale trustee was also concerned that students weren’t learning how to handle money from fundraising, due to a provincial auditor’s report that recommended that students shouldn’t be handling money.
Lori Kidney, the trustee who represents Naicam and rural Tisdale, talked to students from smaller schools during the trustee-student discussion.
“All of the kids are doing fundraising for their school, is my impression. Some of them felt when they joined SRC, then they’d just have to do more fundraising,” she said during the meeting. “They didn’t see it as a democratic process, they just saw it as you have to volunteer to do more fundraising and they said they were already doing fundraising for all of the other stuff we want to do, for sports teams and this and that.”
Luke Perkins, the division’s chair, said after the meeting it isn’t the trustees’ place to dictate how the student representative councils are run.
“I think how those are run is up to the principals of the schools,” he said. “I don’t think we give the principals direction on that. That would be overstepping our boundaries.”
Don Rempel, the division’s director of education, said the observations of the trustees from the trustee-student discussions will be passed on to the principals.
