School Council Meeting Minutes Jan 16th, 2025
Attendance: Cheryl Kalev, Jackie Heide, Shelby Shortneck, Allison Casey, Brittany Sands, Miranda Cameron, Kayleigh Rempel, Jodeen Swan, Dawn Sinclair, Penny Lougheed
Call to order time: 6:29 pm
Previous Meeting - Oct. 17th meeting minutes
The meeting minutes are always available for viewing in a binder at the office. They are also posted on our school website.
Trustee Report- Charlotte Small School was affected by the government's decision to cut the Jordan’s Principle funding by having to lay off 3 EA’s. 2 of these EA’s were funded from Jordan's principle funding but the 3rd was due to a Jordan’s Principle EA from another school whose seniority in the union out ranked her. Thankfully that EA has seemed to fit in at our school just fine. Parents should continue to advocate for JP funding. The division and trustees are advocating as well.
Principal Report - Cheryl would like to extend a heartfelt Thank you to the parent council for the treats in December. It was very much appreciated. They are still doing group meetings between a few of the teachers every Tuesday to discuss their teaching methods for what seems to be working/not working for each of them. This is done with both ends of the school coming together and has really helped to show that some of the practices done in the lower end can still benefit the higher end and vice versa. This is really helping to build camaraderie among our staff. We are hoping to continue doing this practice going forward. .
Chair Report- Nothing new to discuss.
Old Business: No old business to discuss.
New Business:
- All inclusive Playground- Are we ready to create a committee? Jackie has been looking into funding/grants and it is a lot of work so if there are parents that would like to help look into those that would be great. Kayleigh will put another post on the parents facebook page asking for interested parties to contact her to help create a committee. We are also going to ask Bobby-sue to put it into the next school newsletter.
- Outdoor Classroom- We are at the point in our planning where it has gone out for bids for companies to complete this project. These bids should be back in by the end of February-March. We are hoping for the project to be completed by September 2025.
- Ski trip questions- For the Grade 3-4 ski trip- Jackie was under the impression that Canyon Ski hill does not have the greatest conditions for the hills right now from when her children had attended during the break. Allison however did attend this past Thursday and said that the hills conditions were not too bad. Really the hills conditions would all depend on the weather conditions on the day that we planned to go. We would also like to attend Canyon when there is not another school in attendance as it creates some issues when it comes to the training of our students by instructors and the supervision that parents end up doing. Jackie is also going to be out in February for surgery so that also poses an issue for teacher supervision numbers. Right now we are waiting for Canyon to come back to us with some dates for the beginning of March that would not have any other schools attending to interfere with lesson plans for the hill. Jackie will follow up with the plan for this in the school newsletter after she hears back from Canyon which will hopefully be tomorrow. We will need two buses for the Canyon Trip because of student attendance numbers. We will prefer to use the school bus vs coach bussing for travel to Canyon but will still plan to use the coach buses for the Nakiska trip. The Nakiska trip has already had their field trip forms go home.
- Classroom split/no split feedback- Cheryl would like to hear some feedback based on the new style of teaching that has been implemented into some of the classrooms this year. Because of the strange numbers we have for certain grades it was decided to try this new model for this year. She is wondering if parents like this new model better than having split classes? We are most likely going to be running into the same kind of number issues next year allotting the 1.5 teachers to a grade making us need to utilize either this model or the split grades. Next year's numbers are projected to be close to: Grade 2- 28 Grade 3- 34 Grade 4-34 Grade 5- 31. When posed to the teachers at the beginning of this year when that had yet to know classroom assignments all of the teachers did mention they would rather the bigger classes with shared teaching vs a split grade. One of the positives from this current model is that Children are getting more one-on-one lesson time with the teachers. As always if you don't feel comfortable sharing something at the meeting but would like to share your thoughts and feelings please send an email and we can have a conversation. We will come back to future meetings as well when we do know more about next year. The consensus from the group of parents at the meeting seemed to be that they did prefer the current model to the split classes.
- Condor Community Hall- Really appreciates the cooperation with the school in sharing ongoing events at the center within our school as well as the collaboration on using the facilities.
- Meeting dates- Kayleigh has requested that we do a meeting split on Monday/Thursday or Tuesday/Wednesdays next year to hopefully hit more parents to be able to come. Most parents have children in an activity and usually those happen on a mon/wed or tues/thurs split so it would be nice to have offsetting dates to allow them to come to every other meeting.It was suggested that we could potentially do a poll on the school facebook page at the beginning of the year to find out from the parents which days would work the best for them and to try to book our meetings for those days. Kayleigh will handle making the post on the page before the AGM next school year. This topic will be discussed again at the AGM.
- Book issue- There was a book that went out before Christmas time that had a section in it that was not appropriate for children. Miranda is wondering how that issue came to be and what is being done about it now. The problem arose when a child checked a book out of the library and when they got it home they came across some inappropriate context. Thankfully the parent did the proper thing and brought it to the administration's attention. We realize this could have ended very badly if the parent had decided to not bring it to our attention and instead posted on facebook or some other outlet. By bringing this issue to us we were able to control the situation and ensure this book will not be sent out again. We are very thankful to this parent for choosing this route of communication with us. This issue was able to come about because our school relies on a system that shows books that are age appropriate for our children that we can put into our library. We rely on this system because there is absolutely no way that any of our teachers or parents could check every single page of every book that comes into our library. Any books that are brought into the library from outside sources are run through this system before hitting our shelves. There was probably a mistake made when the book was uploaded onto the site.. Unfortunately it is something that was kind of out of our control and we have since removed that book.The librarian did reach out to the company to inform them of this book being inappropriate for children as well. We will put a note in the newsletter asking that if a parent does come across content that they believe is inappropriate to please bring it to our attention so we can deal with it promptly because we don’t know what all our books have in them.
Upcoming Meeting Dates- March 13, May 8 both start @ 6:30 pm
Adjournment Time: 7:22 pm