A three-hour Community Engagement Network (CEN) public meeting will take place at Canmore Collegiate High School (CCHS) on Tuesday, Nov. 26, in an effort to discover exactly where public school communication is failing and what can or should be done about it.
The session will include discussion on website, social media and newsletters. All members of the community are invited attend.
“The CEN is one that Kim Bater and the board initiated at the very beginning of my previous term,” said Canadian Rockies Public School board chair Carol Picard. “And it stemmed from a recognition that we needed to engage the community more than we have been.
“We handle an awful lot of taxpayer dollars and even though most of it is nondiscretionary spending, we have contracts in place with ATA and CUPE and we have obligations that we need to meet. The board’s role is to stick-handle as best we can the nondiscretionary dollars, the small amount that’s left over, into initiatives that are going to move us forward.”
She added community engagement is a big issue for the board and members want to bring people, even if they don’t have children in the school system, into the fold to help make some tough decisions. The meetings have been helpful in the past towards troubleshooting challenges and problem areas.
“We did one on the school calendar, which was quite brilliant. Oddly enough, the school calendar is a huge issue because we give kids two weeks in spring which was traditionally the shoulder season for the local businesses winding down before the summer shows up,” said Picard. “We had a bit of a lull in tourist traffic and that’s when people could escape – not so much anymore, but it’s become part of the local culture, so in order to achieve the 200 days Alberta Education mandate we had to do some fancy stick handling.
“And then there were some people who wanted that February week where we have Family Day. We also have two mandatory days that the kids are off because of the teacher convention and its a five day week with two days only in school and the attendance rate is pretty pathetic, because everyone is taking off for Mazatlán.”
The board ended up taking that information to the public. “We said, ‘help us craft it,’ ” Picard said. “There’s diploma exams, there’s P.A.Ts and it achieved a tremendous sense of understanding among our stakeholders, where they started to go through it and say, ‘well this doesn’t work for me and this doesn’t work for me,’ and their neighbour, whose kids are slightly older, were going, ‘yeah, but it’s got to be this way because we’ve got these exams at this time.’
“By the end of the process we had achieved, if not harmony, at least understanding among the people who had the most at stake with the calendar. We did it again with, ‘should we close the school?’ You know, we’re facing some tough issues in terms of ‘here’s some scenarios we’ve looked at, you bring your ideas to the table.’ People really appreciate it – we don’t get a huge turnout, but they really appreciate being asked, as they should, we should have been doing it ages ago.
“There’s no guarantee we’re going to do what they want, but we need to hear what our stakeholders say. So the one coming up is about communication. We recognize collectively we are not doing a great job on communicating. You need to work with local newspapers and businesses, and that’s just one piece of the puzzle. It includes social media, it includes newsletters. It includes every form of communication people need in this day to keep them in the loop of what’s going on.”
The CEN public meeting will run 6-9 p.m. at Canmore Collegiate High School on Tuesday, Nov. 26.
