Crocus Plains student back on council

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This article was published 08/08/2023 (967 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Siya Patel is excited about her second year as a member of the province’s Student Advisory Council, where she will get the opportunity to represent the interests of her local high school and the Brandon School Division more broadly.

Manitoba’s Student Advisory Council was originally founded in 2021, being check-marked as a priority action in the provincial government’s K to 12 Education Action Plan.

Consisting of 30 students, aged 14 to 18, the original incarnation of this council met virtually to discuss issues related to curriculum and student well-being, eventually submitting an annual report and getting the chance to consult with the minister of education personally.

Patel decided to take part in this group for its 2022-23 incarnation after receiving a lot of encouragement from her parents, while also getting a taste for politics through joining the student council at Crocus Plains Regional Secondary School for the first time.

“I was really interested in how leadership worked,” she told the Sun over the weekend. “So I kind of wanted to join the student council [again] but make more impact.”

During her first year with the Student Advisory Council, Patel recalls how consulting with dozens of other Manitoba high school students really opened her eyes to some major shortcomings in the education system across the board.

For one thing, Patel was surprised with how little of the current curriculum focuses on scientific concepts like climate change, and she would like to see that change given how closely this topic is tied to society’s well-being.

“The first class in which I learned about climate change and stuff was in Grade 9,” recalls Patel, who is heading into her graduating year at Crocus Plains and is interested in studying STEM at a post-secondary institution. “And I really didn’t like that, because it’s something that all grades should be learning.”

In terms of discrepancies between BSD and divisions located in Winnipeg, Patel, in talking with other students, discovered that some schools outside the Perimeter Highway are woefully under-resourced, especially when it comes to clubs and other extracurricular activities.

Admittedly, Patel said the lack of student clubs at local schools like Crocus Plains is partially due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which effectively forbade a lot of these initiatives due to public health concerns.

But even after the province lifted these restrictions in early 2022, Patel said that getting back to an active club community has been slow going, with a lot of students and staff being at the mercy of low funding and administrative bureaucracy.

“Most of the clubs we have are limited to certain people, and they don’t really get much funding often,” she said.

“If I want to start a club, it takes over a year. My friend, she was trying to start a club but she couldn’t because she wasn’t able to get hold of the principal on time.”

BSD budgeting, in general, has been very tight in the wake of the pandemic. The division enacted a variety of staff and programming cuts throughout the 2021-22 and 2022-23 school years to compensate for deficits of $720,000 and $1.2 million, respectively.

BSD school trustees have laid the blame for these deficits squarely at the feet of the Manitoba government, since the province has mandated freezing the division’s ability to collect property taxes through the special requirement and special levy.

While the division managed to pass a much more favourable budget for the 2023-24 school year, this freeze on education property taxes rates remains a troubling precedent for some local education advocates, since BSD is increasingly dependent on the province to balance its books.

“The provincial government’s decisions have shown that funding education is not a priority,” Brandon Teachers’ Association president Tammy Tutkaluk told the school board when they passed their latest budget in March.

“To quote a colleague, ‘the province has dug a hole, and they have given you a shovel to fix it.’”

Having successfully applied for her second term on Manitoba’s Student Advisory Council, Patel is hoping to use this upcoming year to address these kinds of funding issues more directly.

While this kind of advocacy may be a tall order for one full-time, graduating high school student, Patel is at least comforted by the fact that two other BSD pupils will be joining her on the council this year — fellow Crocus Plains student Glydel Capua, and Ivy Zheng from Vincent Massey High School.

“I was really happy because I needed someone to help me and I think it’s not a one-person job,” she said. “You really need various people with their own perspectives to gain more insight.”

Patel expects that the province will release the 2022-23 Student Advisory Council’s annual report sometime later this month.

More information on the Student Advisory Council can be found online at edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/action_plan/studentadvisorycouncil.html.

» kdarbyson@brandonsun.com