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SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
It was not the raucous evening the Yellowknife Catholic school district experienced at its monthly board meeting the week before, but officials with Yk Education District No. 1 say it was high time to have a town hall meeting.

YK1 superintendent Metro Huculak listens in on a discussion about bullying in schools during Wednesday night’s town hall meeting at Range Lake North School. - Laura Busch/NNSL photo

Parents, teachers, administrators and government officials gathered at Range Lake North School Wednesday night to have a town hall discussion about how Yellowknife's public school board is doing and where it can improve.

About 50 people were there but only a little more than a dozen of them were parents - a far cry from 300 or so people who turned out for a Catholic board meeting Jan. 18 to prevent its trustees from letting go longtime employees superintendent Claudia Parker and assistant superintendent Johnnie Bowden.

"I wish we had more parents here," said Alan Shortt, chair of YK1's board of trustees.

"But it's one of those things. If everything is going good, people aren't as concerned and don't show up."

After opening presentations, the evening was split into two 30-minute round-table discussion sessions. Three stations were set up around the atrium of the school. Topics up for discussion were bullying; reading, writing, and mathematics; and staff professional development. These subjects were chosen from feedback given to the board in an anonymous survey conducted in December. There were 189 surveys returned, which the board considers to be a good turnout considering there are about 600 families with students in district schools, said board vice-chair John Stephenson.

The purpose of engaging parents is to gain insight not only on how the schools are doing, but how the children are doing, said Shortt.

Parents who attended agreed.

"I think that if the board is going to give an opportunity like this for parents to show up and talk, it's important to actually show up and engage them so they will keep doing it," said David Wasylciw, who has a child in kindergarten at N.J. Macpherson School.

Another parent, Heather Clarke, who also has a child going to school at N.J. Macpherson, said that her reason for attending was to find out what direction the school district was heading in.

Bullying was a hot topic during the evening. During the first discussion period, most parents went for the bullying table, and a few of the parents in attendance had immediate concerns about their children being bullied at school.

"One of my expectations is that if a parent sends their child to school, they should expect that child is safe," said district superintendent Metro Huculak.

While there was agreement that bullying is a serious issue in schools that can have very negative affects on students, other aspects of the topic were harder to nail down. For example, many people gave different definitions for what bullying is, and there were varying opinions on how it could be dealt with.

A parent's perception relies on what is happening with their child at school, said Shortt. If their child is having problems with bullying, they will be very concerned about that issue. If, on the other hand, their child is struggling with reading, they will be more concerned about how the basics are being taught at schools.

The table for discussion in the three Rs: reading, writing and arithmetic had the largest attendance during the first session. While a lot of the feedback received was positive, there was an overarching theme of a need for more communication between parents and teachers.

There were also a few comments that children who are doing well should be pushed harder academically, and one parent felt that going to university was not being recommended enough at her child's school.

At first, participants in the discussion on staff professional development were almost entirely school teachers and principals.

However, later on in the evening parents joined the discussion to learn more about why their children's teachers were called away from the classroom to receive more training.

The board plans to go over what came out of the night's discussions and will use the feedback during its annual retreat that took place over last weekend at the board office and the Explorer Hotel.

"We're going to put in place some strategies to try and deal with some of the things that have come out of here," said Huculak.

"Because we want to get better at what we do."

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