By Jenn Watt

The following are brief reports of items discussed at the board of trustees meeting of Trillium Lakelands District School Board on Nov. 24.

The school board has taken the first necessary steps to get their equity task force off the ground, with plans to conduct a student and staff census and hire third-party consultants to create policies and procedures ensuring a safe and inclusive learning and working environment.

Dave Golden, superintendent of learning, gave context to the initiative, pointing out in his report that “in order to provide meaningful educational experiences and opportunities to our students, we must understand the culture, beliefs, and identities of our students, and embed into our practices a lens of equity, high student achievement and well-being.”

School boards must also comply with provincial standards on identifying and monitoring systemic racism by Jan. 1, 2023 under the Anti-Racism Act.
The task force will consult stakeholders about current programs and practices, gather information on student populations and area communities, locate barriers hindering success, inclusion and wellbeing, and create programs and resources.
A smaller working group will “take on the responsibility of creating documentation and procedures, communicating with contracted partners, and completing action items in a timely manner,” Golden’s report states.
The superintendent told the trustees that an application had been made to the Ministry of Education for $50,000 to collect the necessary demographic data and that a third party would be contracted to do the work of the staff census and student census.

“We have a wonderful consultant group that we know is very experienced in this area that we know will give us some great direction and help us do some analysis of some of the data as well,” he said.
The staff census is to be conducted in the winter and the student census in the fall.
The task force will meet for the first time in December.

Making way for mental health support

Director of education Wes Hahn said a process was underway to ensure that mental health support workers can get into schools, which currently have strict rules around who is allowed in, due to the coronavirus pandemic.
“It is not an easy time to manage as a family who is struggling or a student who is struggling and we will continue to offer those [mental health] supports and we are looking at ways … through special education and mental health to make sure that we have a crisis support plan, if workers need to get into our schools to see students who are in crisis or need additional support, they’re going to get in,” he said.
Hahn said work was currently underway to make that happen and that local agencies would be contacted.