The Prince Albert Catholic School Division has refined some aspects of emergencies in schools as well as school and division and improvement.
During the board of education’s regular meeting on Monday the board approved some wording changes to several policies.
Director of education Lorel Trumier said they brought three policies to the board table for changes.
“It was refinement in areas such as temporary emergency closure of schools,” Trumier said. “We know that communication has shifted and the way that we can communicate is so much easier than it used to be, so obviously we needed to update those kinds of things.
“The parameters still are the same. If there’s a required need, we would make the decision and we’d communicate it out immediately.”
The board approved word changes to Policy EBCD-Emergency Closing of Schools. The biggest changes involved communication. Trumier said this is mostly because of the way communication has changed since the policy was developed.
“There was a time where we were not able to necessarily communicate to our families electronically, so one of our main methods was always using the radio,” Trumier said.
“Now we can use radio announcement as well as electronic school messenger as an example.
We can also use our school and the electronic way of communicating, so we didn’t just reduce it to one form. We broadened that perspective that we would use multiple ways of communicating to reach as many people as possible.”
The division can now communicate through EDSby and other tools with parents according to Trumier.
Along with the emergency closing policy the board also approved some minor word changes to the Emergency Drills (Evacuations, Safe Zones and Lockdowns) policy. The changes included giving principals until ‘no later than’ as opposed to ‘On’ June 30 to submit a record of drills to Trumier.
As well any call of an emergency will be done by ‘designated staff’. Locations for evacuations and procedures are also now set by principals in the new wording.
They also looked at strategic plan alignment with the learning improvement plan at schools and how those two function together.
“That’s very important work that our staff do to ensure that we’re meeting the needs of students and looking at the targets of our province and the learning targets that we’d set out as a school division as well, so there was a bit of refinement on that front and in a couple of policies,” Trumier said.
One change sees that the School LIP (Learning Improvement Plan) can be submitted by the third week of June as opposed to June 15 as was stated before the policy change. Another change is that the division will now take into account student achievement, student and parent feedback as opposed to ‘the nature of the community and division’ as the policy previously read.
Board Direction and Policy revisions can occur during each meeting of the Board of Education as policies come up for review.
