School Council

Monday, April 3, 2023

Present:

Chris Row                        *Farah Qazi (virtual)

*Karmyn Bokma                Lisa Robert

*Jenna Burnham                Christian Brudjnak

*Kerri Nowacki                        Andrea Howard

*Sarah Bean                        Ioulia (Julia) Moustei

*Nikki Pembleton                John Giannakis

*Andrea Young                         Angela vanderMerwe                

Approval of Minutes from Feb. 6, 2023 – motion by Nikki, seconded by Kerri

Principal’s Report 

• Basketball season is complete.  Both teams made it to the semi finals.
• Volleyball has started.  The junior team has their first game on Wednesday, April 5
• Art and Glee clubs are running.
• Track and field will start up in mid May.
• May 8 – the kids will have an assembly with the Saidat Show
• Grade 3 swim to survive will be running this year again.
• Staffing – tentative assignments have been given.  Class building will be happening soon with a google form being sent to parents to give input on classes.
• Primary literacy – building on sound fundamentals.  Focus is on how to best help the 20% of people who really struggle with reading.
• Junior grades are focusing on math strategies for addition.  Going backwards to strengthen those skills so that multiplication, division, etc comes easier.
• Graduation will be June 26th.  The Grade 8s will go on trips on June 22&23.
• Kindergarten open house will happen again this year after 3 years of not being able to run it.
• SEM goes bowling on April 28th.  School will be paying for the trip.  Possibly council will help cover the cost of buses.
• Fun Day in June will happen with inflatables and games.  It will be done in partnership with staff, students and council.
• Bathrooms were painted and given new floors over March Break.  The boy’s bathroom walls are already wrecked.  The money for the repairs and improvements came from the provincial government.
• Academic assessments – how does that work?  School board has a school improvement plan.  Every school has the same goal for math and language.  Use staff meetings and PA days to improve the learning and teaching of these skills.  Teachers do PD and bring back their learning to share with the staff.

Treasurer’s Report 

• Currently we have $9830.13.  Pizza will take $7680 from that leaving council with $2150.

General Discussion

• Movie night debrief – should just go with cheese pizza because we had a lot of pepperoni leftover.  Possibly because of the date change, people re-ordered pizza leading to the extra pizzas.  A lot of individual sales went on.  The ticketing system worked well.  Keep the food more separated that are worth different amounts of tickets.  Different colours instead of numbers of tickets for next time.  Ring pops might be better next time as rice krispie squares weren’t a huge hit.  Jenna will create a document with the step-by-step process of setting up movie nights.
• Multicultural Night – partner with student council.  We need to figure out the purpose and the size of the event.  Requires time, energy, and planning.  Chris has asked other schools to get some of their supplies/ideas that have worked well.  Send out a message to school saying this is the date and time and have families/groups sign up to have a table.  Could have a performance schedule for groups to show off their cultural dances.  How will we reach out and get the interest in our school community? Success depends on who will volunteer to set up tables.  Student leadership showed lots of interest. Multicultural committee/Welcome Centre will supply us with multi-lingual information.  Best to do at the end of May.  Agreed to make it happen on May 30, 6:30-8.  People can set up tables earlier.  Could invite Charles Best to join us.  Chris will speak to leadership this week to see if they can form a team to help plan and run this.  Set up a google form for families to express interest and availability for Chris to send out by the end of this week.  Emphasize that a table can be put together by a group not just one family.  Ask which countries the families would want to represent and connect the groups.  Set up a smaller committee to run this event and be the middle person.  302 kids in the school and many do not have a platform to share them.  We need to give every family an opportunity and time to present.  It is a steppingstone to grow from.  Whatever we get, we run with it.  We could also ask the MMR multicultural team.  Call it a ‘World Tour’ to take away the connotation of culture, religion.  Give a passport to the families to visit the different tables.  It’s an invitation to all to come into the school and get to know one another better.
• Traditionally, council has given money to grad.  2 choices – deplete our budget and start fresh next year or keep it and spend somewhere else.  We had earmarked $1500 for grad.  How do we want to start next year?  School can handle grad, bowling trip and year end celebration.  We will use the money to benefit the whole school.  Think about where we want to spend the money and talk online about it (i.e. – bus trip for bowling, money towards the year end event, save it for next year).
• Fundraising ideas for early next school year – Terra fundraiser

Next Meeting: June 12, 2023

         7:45 Meeting adjourned