Gustafson looks ahead to school year

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This article was published 29/08/2022 (1235 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After starting the last two academic years under various COVID-19 restrictions, Brandon School Division administration is gearing up for a fall semester that will look a lot more like the pre-pandemic era.

Talking to the Sun last week, Supt. Mathew Gustafson confirmed that BSD’s 2022-23 school year is going to begin the same way its 2021-22 year ended in June, as staff and students won’t be required to wear masks, take part in remote learning or abide by social distancing measures in class.

While Gustafson said these current guidelines from Public Health and Manitoba Education will allow the division to conduct a mostly normal orientation week for the first time since 2019, he’s anticipating that it will take time for some students to adjust to the new status quo.

“For some of our students in kindergarten, Grade 1 and Grade 2, they know nothing but a pandemic-influenced school year,” he said.

“And for some of our high school students, they spent two years of their high school career under certain restrictions and things like that. So there will be some things to relearn for students and staff as we start to resume some of the activities and events that we would have had in the past.”

Despite his optimism surrounding this upcoming academic year, Gustafson isn’t blind to the other major challenges the BSD administration will be facing throughout the next 10 months.

One of the biggest shadows looming over the division is its 2022-23 operating budget ($114,491,500), which the BSD board of trustees passed after signing off on a lot of major cuts due to a $1.2-million deficit.

Even though the board officially approved this budget in March, Gustafson said the division will make some additional adjustments due to the massive inflationary increase the country has endured throughout the past six months.

“For some of our controllables and non-controllables, we’ve had zero-based increases in our supplies for the last number of budgets,” he said.

“So with the budget set, we have to adjust within that to be able to cover some of those costs. But that we will do internally.”

BSD’s 2022-23 operating budget also includes a decrease of 10.69 full-time equivalent (FTE) positions, including speech-language pathologists (one FTE), psychologists (one FTE), high school lunch supervision (one FTE) and the Reading Recovery program (0.75 FTE).

However, Gustafson reiterated that none of these FTE reductions include full-time teachers and therefore won’t impact the classroom directly, stating that BSD is currently in a “very good spot in terms of being able to maintain the [student-teacher] classroom ratio.”

One major positive development since the passing of the 2022-23 budget is the resurrection of the Comprehensive Health Care Aide program, which is conducted at Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School courtesy of Assiniboine Community College.

While the program was originally cut to save the division around $45,000, ACC later offered to foot a larger chunk of the bill for the upcoming academic year, giving Crocus Plains students the opportunity to, once again, gain hands-on experience in the medical field right before they graduate.

“As a division, we’re still able to offer the space and they were able to take care of some of the costs,” Gustafson said. “So we were very thankful to be able to see that come back and are very appreciative to ACC.”

In terms of major changes to learning and the curriculum, the Manitoba government recently decided to discontinue Grade 12 provincial exams, opting to pilot a series of new standardized tests created by local teachers for Grade 10 students instead.

Even though Gustafson admits he doesn’t exactly know what these new summative assessments will look like in action, he’s confident his staff will be able to properly prepare students in the classroom, especially since they won’t have to contend with major COVID-19 restrictions at the same time.

“Because they’re not health practitioners. They’re educators,” he said. “So being able to get back to focus more on the education aspect, I think, will be welcomed by many.”

Despite this planned return to normalcy, Gustafson is certain that some parents and students still won’t feel comfortable taking part in in-person activities at first given all that has happened over the past two and a half years.

Because of this, Gustafson said it is more important than ever to maintain strong communication channels with parents to determine what’s best for their children moving forward.

“And we think that’s going to be a very large part [of our strategy] whether it is in the areas of literacy, numeracy or mental health,” he said.

BSD’s 2022-23 school year is scheduled to officially begin on Sept. 7 for Grade 1-8 students and high school freshmen. Students in Grades 10-12 will follow suit on Sept. 8.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com

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