WEYBURN – The strategic plan for the Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division for the 2023-24 school year was approved by the board of trustees at their March meeting on Wednesday evening.
The plan was given the green light in the absence of a provincial education plan, as it is still in the works by the ministry and school divisions.
Holy Family’s strategic plan left a couple of holes yet to be filled, such as question marks for the goal of what percentage of students will be reading at grade level by the end of the school year. This is due to the provincial plan not being finished yet, the trustees were told.
The school division has adopted the theme of “Embracing God’s grace” for the next school year, noted education director Gwen Keith, adding, “We still work within the parameters of the government in four key areas.”
The strategic plan will continue the aim of monitoring that the division’s Catholic distinctiveness is maintained.
Keith noted that if the student outcome goals are not set by the government yet, the school division will still set their own goals to shoot for.
The plan ensures there are opportunities for early learning students and their families to be able to transition into Kindergarten and Grade 1, and Keith noted their partnership with ECIP (Early Childhood Intervention Program) “is one of the areas we feel very good about.”
In addition, the school division will enrich and enhance the mental health and well-being of students and staff in the next school year.
“We will implement our own school division’s well-being plan,” added Keith.
The Our School survey will be done with students in Grades 4-9 to gauge how well the students are engaged with their schools and classrooms.
Holy Family will also continue to work towards reconciliation with First Nations peoples, said Keith, and they are excited to work with their knowledge keepers on keeping on this path.
“A lot of this is the same as we’ve been doing over the last few years,” noted board chair Bruno Tuchscherer.
Superintendent Chad Fingler noted he will be attending a conference this month with superintendents from around the province, and he said he’s looking forward to hearing what other school divisions are doing in light of the provincial education plan still being worked on.
• In other board business, the question was raised if Holy Family is safe from being hacked, as neighbouring division Southeast Cornerstone had been hit recently in their computer systems.
“The benefits of our system is last year we moved to a cloud source, managed by IBM,” said Fingler, noting the computer company’s security is very stringent and up-to-date.
“If someone got into a teacher’s or student’s account, they’re going to be contained within that account and will not be able to enter Holy Family’s servers,” he added. “On top of that, we regularly have IBM come in to do an assessment of our system.”
