Monday, October 19, 2009

Budget Challenge 2010

North Van School District announced a series of finance and facilities public consultation meetings to try and address the ongoing budget challenges faced by the school district. The aim of the meetings is to arrive at an understanding of what the "core" education requirements are for students, how the district expands on that in its current programs and what is needed to maintain quality of education.


This discussion is important because it moves the budget discussion from an annual discussion of cuts and facilities to a discussion about what sort of education we want for our children in North Vancouver and how we can re-organize the district and build programs to deliver high quality education. 


If you are interested in contributing and have ideas about how we can maintain the quality of education for all students across North Vancouver then these would be good set of meetings to attend. I will be there.



7 p.m. October 20, 2009: Highlands Elementary, 3150 Colwood Drive
Distinguishing mandatory and optional services and prioritizing for Instructional Practice, Program Diversity, Community Connections, Facilities and Information and Communication Technology.
7 p.m. November 18, 2009Sutherland Secondary, 1860 Sutherland Avenue
The World CafĂ©: “how do we define student achievement and how much program diversity can we afford?”
7 p.m. December 1, 2009: Leo Marshall Curriculum Center, 810 West 21st Street
Reviewing the service delivery options and arriving at recommendations.

Sunday, October 4, 2009

Advocating for our Schools


The North Vancouver Parent Advisory Council (NVPAC) is asking all parents in North Vancouver to contact their MLAs by phone, by mail and by email.

You, as parents and the public, represent first hand the voting community. It is up to you to inform the government as to how their cuts to school and PAC funding are impacting your schools and your children. We ask you to insist on funding for education: it is not a luxury and it cannot sustain continual erosion.

NVPAC is sending letters to our government, but as an organization, we do not vote. You do. You are who the government needs to hear from, so please, send a letter. Send a bunch of letters. Overwhelm the 2010 budget consultation survey with responses (BC 2010 Budget Consultation Survey). Cuts to education need to be reversed to maintain the quality of education in BC.

NVPAC School Funding Primer

Want to know more about the situation? Why we are asking you to do this? What to do? Please read  our primer on school funding.  We've tried to capture what you need to do and why as well as we can there.  But if you want to know more, feel free to ask us or even better come to an NVPAC or School Board public meeting.  For more information contact info@northvanpac.org

Welcome to the North Van Pac Blog

We at North Van Pac have a lot to communicate this year. Until now we have focused on email and newsletters as our communication vehicle but have found this creates challenges with the distribution and timeliness of our communications. A blog will let us reach out to our community in a more timely fashion and enable our readers to keep in touch with events in North Vancouver without having to rely on email distribution lists.

We hope through this we can improve our ability to serve our community in a timely fashion