WEYBURN - In the role of education, the degree of complexity is changing all the time. Members of the Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School board had an opportunity to address new complexities in the educational environment with MLA Mike Weger, Weyburn-Bengough.
“There are lots of gifts that (newcomers to our province) bring along with them, but at the same time, there’s some challenges that come with that as well. Language acquisition is one,” said Ken Sampson, director of education with Holy Family. “The degree of complexity with which students are actually coming to our schools is ever-growing.”
In January, the government provided a $3.6 million investment to fund a specialized support classroom pilot in eight school divisions, which started in February and runs until the end of the 2024-25 school year.
Sampson noted that at their last Provincial Education Plan (PEP) meeting, they had received tremendous positive feedback in terms of the degree to which that program, those dollars, have been able to positively impact those schools.
The province is now looking ahead to expand the program, announcing 200-plus specialized support classrooms introduced across the province.
One of the statistics that was noted during the meeting, is that the amount of students who do not have English as their first language is quite high in the school division, and it is continuing to grow.
“It’s not growing arithmetically, it’s going exponentially,” said Sampson. “From a complexity perspective, we’ve gone from 58 one year to 77 another. We’re just at 100 now. EAL numbers are, again, going exponential.”
“The real positive thing that came from the directors meeting for this particular area was the degree to which they would be allowed to be flexible and how they rolled that out and how they created that space to support that level of complexity in schools,” said Sampson. “If we could continue with that flexibility, that would be awesome.”
“The challenge is that we also have more students in our schools than we have ever had,” said Chad Fingler, superintendent of schools for Holy Family. He brought up the question of equating the cost of education per student being considered at the government level.
“Is a cost of education per student the best statistic that we need to be looking at? At the end of the day, the struggle is keeping up with the increased population, and you’re always going to be a couple steps behind when you see a population increase, and then it coming from immigration as well. It’s bringing all of its extra challenges, and we’re just trying to keep up with that. It’s hard to predict it,” answered MLA Weger.
