(File photo/battlefordsNOW staff)

By Angela Brown

Annual Meeting

Living Sky School Division meets with MLAs for update on successes, financial needs

Feb 22, 2021 | 3:18 PM

Living Sky School Division met online with some of the area MLAs for the district recently, to give them an update on the division’s accomplishments as well as a number of its financial needs in the midst of the pandemic.

Four MLA’s attended: Jeremy Cockrill (The Battlefords), Ryan Domotor (Cut Knife–Turtleford), Randy Weekes (Biggar-Sask Valley) and Ken Francis (Kindersley). Premier Scott Moe (Rosthern-Shellbrook), and Jeremy Harrison (Meadow Lake) were absent.

“It gives us an opportunity as a school division to give some education to our MLAs about our school division,” board chair Ronna Pethick told battlefordsNOW. “It also gives us an opportunity to share our successes and also the challenges that we face. It’s always good to be able to talk with our MLAs and answer any questions they have. I thought the meeting went very well.”

The school division discussed some of its financial pressures with the MLAs.

“Funding is always a challenge for school divisions, because our needs keep increasing and of course our costs keep increasing,” Pethick said. “To have sustainable ongoing funding is always at front and centre for our school division. We are so grateful that we have had some COVID funding, and that our last budget was a good budget. It was basically a status quo budget. So we’ll see what this next [provincial] budget brings. But we face so many challenges especially during a pandemic with increased costs.”

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The division is also looking for more help for mental health needs for students, during the pandemic.

“Our mental health supports that are ongoing in our school division are to meet those mental health issues for our students,” Pethick said. “They are not [reducing]; they continue to grow. Certainly during the pandemic our students’ anxiety levels are increasing… There is a myriad of reasons why mental health issues have increased during the pandemic. So to have sustainable funding ongoing for counsellors, for supports for our students, those keep increasing.”

MLA Ken Francis said at the end of the meeting with Living Sky School Division he understands about the challenges of budget constraints.

“Obviously it’s a tough job on our end to try to sort everything out to try to develop a budget that is fair to all the ministries,” he said. “Not that education isn’t as important as health or anything else. It is just a real challenge right now with COVID. We seem like we are chasing our tail, trying to keep up with all the pressures.”

Francis said the school division representatives made several good points during the meeting he was not aware of that he will keep in mind.

“We’ll certainly take it back to the Ministry of Finance officials,” he said. “Every situation, every school division is a little bit different. I have a better understanding of that after this meeting.”

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angela.brown@jpbg.ca

On Twitter: @battlefordsNOW