The Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School District held their most recent monthly meeting on Nov. 20 and invited Father Brian Meredith from St. John the Baptist Parish in Estevan to join them as they discussed many topics, including a new approach to preventing and stopping bullying in their school. Director of Education, Gwen Keith, is leading the board in another direction to address the issue.
"What we want to do is go deeply with this one," said Keith, who explained they are formulating a positive approach to dealing with something negative and using the principles of Dr. Jerry Goebel to address the issue of bullying. She said the old model of setting boundaries and punishment if those boundaries are broken isn't really changing things and the board wants to increase empathy in their students.
"We're going to get the students more proactively involved," said Keith.
Other steps include looking at who makes the students feel valued and how to get the students to really think about how they interact with one another.
"The best way is for students to teach students," said Keith. "The staff are quite keen about this as well."
As part of the annual organizational meeting, nominations were held board positions. Bruno Tuchscherer was nominated to be board chairperson and Karen Melle to act as vice chair.
The board also reviewed and set its key priorities for the 2013-14 school year. They will be focusing on Catholic distinctiveness and differences, academic excellence, proactive student engagement and stakeholder linkages.
Holy Family will show their Catholic distinctiveness and difference by organizing religious celebrations and rituals, through communications and branding, in their educational focus which will be integrated with Student First and special programming and external connections and projects.
Student First, the large provincial initiative to increase education standards in Saskatchewan, comes into effect next year and the board is preparing for it.
"We're really focusing on helping teachers," said Keith, who explained the board is helping make teachers aware of the priorities and visiting classes.
Holy Family's academic excellence goals are to have 90 per cent of kindergarten students ready to learn according to the EYE, 80 per cent of students in Grade 1 to 9 reading at or above their grade level according to the Saskatchewan curriculum and AIMSweb measurements, and a 30 per cent relative growth identified in math computation skills of the students in Grades 1 to 9 according to AIMSweb.
The board is part of the calendar committee which is working on the 2014-15 school year calendar in conjunction with other stakeholders such as the Southeast Cornerstone School District. The calendar for the next school year is expected to be completed in the first half of March of 2014.
Keith said there are many complexities to consider when formalizing a calendar, but she understands the importance to the community of getting that calendar and they are working diligently on it.
A Staff Awards Night and Social will be held in Estevan on April 25, 2014 and the next Holy Family board meeting will be Wednesday, Dec. 11 in Weyburn.
