SASKATCHEWAN CHAPTER
GOVERNOR’S REPORT
PACIFIC NORTHWEST REGION
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA
JANUARY 21, 2005
Saskatchewan Chapter Annual Conference:
The theme of this year’s conference is “Joining Forces - Maximizing the Benefits”. With the ever increasing demands for construction and renovation funding to maintain and improve our educational facilities options of partnerships, joint-use facilities and alternate methods of operations and project delivery must always be considered to maximize the effect of the available funds to deliver the most beneficial project for the students, staff and school administration.
This year’s conference is scheduled for January 26, 27 and 28 in Regina at the Ramada Hotel and Conference Centre. Your conference committee is hard at work putting together another excellent gathering with informative educational sessions.
Membership:
Our membership has remained constant at approximately 30 members for the past several years.
We have constantly been considering how we may be able to provide additional benefits to those in Saskatchewan, as an initiative to become members of CEFPI, such as reduced conference registration rates.
Initiatives:
At this year’s annual conference the Saskatchewan Chapter will be presenting a scholarship, in the amount of $450, to a school division member of CEFPI, selected at random. The school division will then award the scholarship to a grade student in their division, based upon the criteria established by the Saskatchewan CEFPI executive. This is an attempt to highlight CEFPI in the school divisions and to provide an added benefit to school divisions who are members.
Several of the CEFPI executive have been working with the Saskatchewan Education Technology Consortium to provide assistance to the e-business sub-committee in regard to the development or procurement of a facility assessment software package that could be made available for use by all school divisions in the province. This will not only provide assistance to each of the individual school divisions, it will assist SaskLearning by receiving information from various division in regard to facility conditions, in a common reporting format. The hope is to have a product ready for implementation in the early part of 2006, shortly after the school division amalgamation deadline.
We are now producing the Saskatchewan CEFPI newsletter in an electronic format only. This is largely due to the amount of time and cost required to produce the newsletter in a hard copy format and to distribute the newsletter to the various school divisions. The December 2004 newsletter is posted on the CEFPI website.
Saskatchewan School Division Amalgamation
We knew it was coming and now it is official. On Friday November 12, 2004, recommendations from the education equity task force in regard to the amalgamation of Saskatchewan School Districts were accepted by the Provincial Government. The amalgamation plan will see the number of Saskatchewan School Districts cut from 81 to 34. This will come into effect on January 1, 2006. Of the 81 existing districts, 22 districts will see no changes, which include city districts in Saskatoon, Regina, Lloydminster, francophone and religious school districts and the three northern school divisions. The remaining 59 districts will be combined into 12 districts, each with a minimum of 5,000 students.
How this amalgamation will effect our membership numbers in CEFPI is unknown at this time.
I would like to express my thanks to the current members of the Saskatchewan CEFPI Board of Directors for the commitment of their time, efforts and dedication to CEFPI over the past year. Without the volunteer efforts of the executive and numerous other members involved in the planning of CEFPI Saskatchewan events, we would not exist. Keep up the great work.