Trustees gather as provincial budget nears

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This article was published 20/03/2017 (2586 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Hanover School Division board chair Ron Falk said this year’s general meeting of the Manitoba School Boards Association was once again time well spent.

“I don’t think I’ve missed one yet,” said Falk said, who has served as a trustee for more than 20 years. He called the convention a valuable professional development and networking experience that brings trustees from across the province into contact with fresh ideas and new faces.

Falk said seven of the division’s nine trustees attended the convention, which focused this year on governance and how to strike the right balance in leadership.

“Are you going to micromanage everything? Are you a governance board setting policy? Each school board has to settle on where they feel comfortable,” he said, adding HSD has tried to walk a middle road. Size has proven to be a challenge in this regard, Falk said. HSD’s growth has prompted its trustees to drop or delegate certain responsibilities that it handled when it was smaller, he explained.

“We needed to get out of some of the day-to-day management issues and work more on the governance side. It’s always a work in progress,” Falk said. “The general population expects us to know a lot of what’s going on at the grassroots level, and yet we shouldn’t be dealing in minutiae as well, so it’s a balancing act.”

Resolutions are the backbone of any convention, though Falk observed that fewer than 10 were offered this year. He recalled more than two dozen at conventions in years past. Region 3, of which HSD is a part, did not put forward any resolutions at this year’s gathering.

Falk said he was particularly engaged by a last-minute resolution regarding guidelines for handling the impact of concussions on students as well a resolution that would see the MSBA press the province to include mental health training in all bachelor of education programs.

Falk said he was also intrigued by a resolution to ask the province to introduce a mandatory science credit in Grades 11 and 12. Currently, and unlike other subjects, only Grade 9 and 10 science credits are required for graduation.

“At first blush it sounds like a really great idea,” said Falk. “But on the other hand, how much do you want to mandate required courses? The more you mandate, the fewer options there are for students.”

“There has to be some flexibility in allowing students to pursue a direction that they feel they are good at or interested in,” he concluded. He pointed to HSD’s summer science camps as one way that keen local students can engage in further science-related study.

The provincial budget is less than one month away and that fact was not lost on trustees in attendance.

“There’s a sense that things are going to change,” he said. “We’ve had comments from department officials suggesting that there definitely would be changes…everything, I think, is just being reviewed.”

Falk cited last week’s replacement of the NDP’s Smaller Classes Initiative with the PC’s Early Years Education Initiative as an example the type of the changes to come.

In the meantime, Falk expects fellow trustees will debrief with one another about the various workshops they attended, including a student-led panel on success in community involvement.