Board Meeting Summary - Jan 24, 2012

The Jan 24th board Meeting was a long one covering student achievement, a new soccer academy, plans for public consultation on surplus land, consultation on the operating budget, an update on planning for the Community Learning Program at Balmoral and a variety of other concerns. 

Below is my summary of what I heard

District Soccer Academy @ Windsor

The big news for the evening was the boards approval of a new District Soccer Academy at Windsor High School starting in Sept 2012 and operating in a similar fashion to the successful Hockey Academy program at the school. This is definitely good news for the soccer mad amongst us. North Van has various mechanisms to enable students to integrate their athletic and academic pursuits and this new program demonstrates once again North Van's interest in enabling enthusiastic students to pursue their interests.

In a similar vein of enabling enthusiastic students, Trustee McGraw reported on the Digital Media Academy's visit to the EA Sports Motion Capture Studio this past month. The students were able to use the facility to incorporate motion capture animation into their projects but more importantly, were able to strengthen their connection to an industry of interest to them.

Community Learning Program @ Balmoral

The most contentious topic of the evening concerned the evolving plans for the Balmoral site. A number of community members spoke on the issue and the need for better consultation with the public over the planned and proposed uses of the school. With the new community learning program moving into Balmoral in September along with multiple potential other educational uses (distributed learning, adult learning, recreational usage etc) there will be a lot of changes in how that facility will be used, changes to traffic etc. and the district needs to work through with the public and the community what the impact of those changes will be. The uncertainty around the full scope of these changes and how they will go into effect needs to be dealt with and the districts move to further consultation with the community on the changes should help to ensure a better migration to the new mandate for the school.

Mary Tasi

A short presentation was made to outgoing Trustee, Mary Tasi with her family present. Superintendent Lewis highlighted the caring, compassion, concern for others and creativity Mary demonstrated during her term as Trustee and it was nice to see Mary honoured for this. 

There was a report given on student achievement, which essentially shows slight improvement and an above average rating overall for North Van. I had to leave during this discussion so I missed much more than that. 

Surplus Land

Returned to the discussion on surplus land consultation. The district wants to improve its consultation process around surplus land and will be running a committee to recommend a repeatable process that can be used whenever surplus land is available. This seems a worthy effort as it would help people to understand the process around how the land decisions will be made. 

Budget Consultation

Due to the significant cuts made 2 years ago NVSD is in a strong financial position and estimates having $1million more that expected to include in next years budget, the planning for which has started. The next finance and facilities meeting will kick off consultation on what to do with the extra money as well as maintain the balance budget. 

Enhanced Learning Opportunities

It changes with the addition of the soccer academy but there was a lot of discussion about enhanced learning opportunities in North Van at this meeting. One of the challenges many students face is simply finding out about what is on offer within a complex calendar. As John Lewis expressed in the meeting success is more related to personalized learning every day within the classroom than personalizing the learning through specialized academies, it is important to offer students of all types appropriate options for their interests. To help with this the district has produced a new brochure summarizing the secondary enhanced learning opportunities in North Vancouver. Any student heading into secondary school should read this to understand the options available to them.

Superintendant's Report

Superintendant Lewis took the opportunity of his report to, amongst other things, bring attention to and thank the school-based administrators for the load they are carrying during what is now the longest job action in BC schools history, over 100 days with little to show for it. 

My goodness the teacher's job action is playing havoc with the school administrators! On top of everything else, with the teacher's not supporting provincial exams the principals and other school based admin will now be supervising and marking all of the FSA exams and if it continues pretty much all of the provincial exams. They have already had to produce all the non-report cards. And while some people are happy as they are talking to the teachers more (good) many parents and students at the secondary level are getting concerned about how the lack of marks and other feedback impacts their ability to make choices for summer school and course selection for coming school year and helping in this area may also fall to the admin. So please, thank your school admin for their efforts this year.