Oct 23rd NVSD Board Meeting observations

The Oct 23rd Board Meeting saw the approval of the capital plan prioritizing Argyle and Handsworth for seismic upgrade or replacement, the selection of Queen Mary as an IB candidate school and reports on class sizes and special needs support changes this year.

International Baccalaureate at Queen Mary

Because of the limited opportunity for consultation on the selection, the most contentious decision of the evening was the selection of Queen Mary as the site for the next potential introduction of the International Baccalaureate primary years program (PYP) in North Vancouver.

Since the introduction of IB Primary Year at Capilano Elementary the school's enrolment has grown to the point it is full and no longer has capacity even to accept students within its own catchment. There is no doubt that the program is in demand by parents across the district. As a result the school district determined there was a need for a second elementary school offering the IB PYP program.

The selection criteria for where to site this school were discussed at the October 2nd Toward the Future of Schools meeting. The desire at that time was to locate IB at a school with space to support student enrolment from across the district and that could readily feed students into the IB programs at Carson Graham. At that meeting Queen Mary was identified as the top candidate.

While there was little debate that Queen Mary would be an appropriate site for IB the eventual decision was contentious because of debate whether sufficient consultation had taken place to confirm that the community, staff and teachers supported the introduction of such a program.

The concern at the board meeting was that it had only been 21 days since Queen Mary had been selected as the top candidate and that there had been little time to discuss the option with the community. How much consultation is needed in any situation is always hard to say. The introduction of IB is a potentially major change for the school, for its staff and for its students. However it was also clear that the consultation that was done with the teachers, students and community since Queen Mary was selected had resulted in a clearly supportive response from the community.

Now, with the site chosen, the difficult task of going through the 3 year process to become accredited falls to the district, school, community and staff.

The reality is that many schools would like to offer the IB program and as we see the demand for the program grow the District needs to decide what its long-term plan for IB is and to what degree they should invest in the wider rollout of IB.

Class Sizes

While no longer required by the Ministry, Superintendent John Lewis reported on the class size distribution within North Van schools. Last year's legislation removed district class size averages as a requirement, leaving only maximum class sizes stipulations for schools to work within. The change means that school boards no longer need to have a number of small classes to offset big ones, such as French immersion classes, in order to keep the average under the limits.

With more flexibility to manage class sizes, the school district has elementary class size average has gone up by almost 1 student per class this year from last, this means more classes are operating near the maximum class sizes this year with fewer small classes. Making this change has enabled the District to allocate more teachers to secondary school classes and by doing so eliminate many of the large classes over 30 students in our secondary schools. In our secondary classes, the district is down from 337 classes over 30 students last year to only 100 this year.

Graduation Requirements

The Ministry of Education is conducting public consultation sessions in an effort to revise the graduation requirements for the BC education system. The North Vancouver session will be held on November 19th, 2012. NorthVanPAC will be posting further information on the event once it is available.

Priority Educational Needs

The President's Council dinner is an annual tradition at the school district during which the partner groups (Trustees, School Administrators, Teachers, Staff and Parents) meet to discuss some of the main themes for the coming year. This year's discussion revolved around identifying priority educational needs to which potential funds from any disposition of lands could be applied either as capital or operating funds.

Each partner group was asked to submit our input on the Priority Educational Needs for the District after the meeting but it was generally agreed that we needed more time to consult with our members. A report on the Priority Educational Needs for the District as identified by the different partner groups had been expected at the meeting but instead partners were asked at the meeting to submit our input by Nov 15th.

NorthVanPAC had prepared a rough initial submission which was developed without significant parent input but will try to expand upon this over the coming weeks in order to provide a more representative input to the process.