Border Land School Division (BLSD) has launched the 2024/25 school year with a new board chair at the helm.
Steven Wiebe was elected at their September meeting, and says they plan to continue the good work already established as a board.
“Over the years we’ve developed into quite a high-functioning board, with good communication skills. Everyone around the table had a chance to have their views made known, and to explain various positions, and we’ll work diligently to keep that good consensus as a group.”
Wiebe has worked with a variety of issues and board members during his 14 years at the table and is looking forward to working with vice-chair Mark Krahn and second vice-chair Albert Klassen.
“Both of them have at least one term under their belt, and I think the three of us can form a strong leadership team. We come from slightly different backgrounds and perspectives, but we’ve always been able to work together to come to an agreement. They also have great leadership potential. If I have something up or can’t make it to a meeting, I would be perfectly comfortable with one of them stepping up and taking charge in the meantime.”
Wiebe says their biggest hurdles this year will involve financial decisions.
“We’ve been in limbo as a board for years. It’s laughable how long we’ve wondered about the future of our financial situation. Under the provincial PC government, we were told we could not raise taxes locally. So we were at their whim of offering us some small budgetary increases every year, which didn’t match with inflationary pressure we were faced with. And now under the NDP government, there’s been some interesting developments as far as financing, such as a new, provincewide funding agreement formula. We’re still wondering when that’s coming out and have no idea what that’s going to entail for us.”
The board is concerned that rural divisions in general may not get a fair shake.
“I don’t know if there’s a clear understanding of the high pupil costs in our division. We have a lot of small schools—colony schools and small community schools—that are very important to us. What happens when you have very few students in those satellite schools is your overall operating costs are higher and of course, on top of all that is a very hefty transportation bill. We’re putting hundreds of thousands of kilometres every year on our bus fleet, and there’s no way to do that inexpensively.”
Right now, in terms of enrollment, Wiebe says things are stable.
“It looks more like the status quo. We’d love to see more enrollment, but at least we’re not going down.”
For now, they’re prepared for the new mandated salary increases for teaching staff.
“But going forward, we’re going to need budgetary increases to absorb that. All those things create enormous pressure, and we don’t want to have to dig deep in local taxes. Even in the last budget, when we were allowed to tax locally, we kept it very conservative, and we did our best to manage without a huge increase. But we did have to anticipate some costs that we knew were coming with the new collective agreement. And again, we need the province to come to the table and send more money our way in the upcoming years. That will be the big challenge.”
In spite of nickel and diming themselves, Wiebe says the division has always done everything it can to keep the level of education high for the students.
“I think we managed to do that. I think we can always use more support staff, but we’ve done the best we can to try to keep the student/teacher ratio reasonable and manage class sizes. There are infrastructure issues, boilers at school, and surprise breakdowns and expenses. We don’t have the cushion we once had to absorb that stuff. But we’re working on it.”
Meanwhile, Wiebe says he’s excited to work with the group they have.
“We’re still really happy with our leadership in the division. It’s exciting. I can’t give enough credit to Patty Wiebe for her two years of leadership. She set a great example of how to lead with passion and enthusiasm. She’s a hard act to follow.”
Meanwhile, succession planning is always a consideration.
“We’ve tried to plan ahead, with committee placements and leadership positions within the board. In the event that a couple of longer serving members decide not to run again in two years, we’ve got some who are more than likely to continue that have already built some experience. That kind of succession planning is important. It would be easy to let the best leader keep leading, but much to her credit, we had to shuffle things so there’s a bit of rotation. We’re doing something a little different but it’s also a little positive. Patty has been great as an ear for what’s happening politically. To have her continuing with us is going to be great.”
Wiebe adds, “Putting a highlight on communication seems like such a simple thing. I’m not planning on breaking new ground; we’ve already got a great model. We’ll continue to work on our goals making sure we refer back to them regularly.”
