The public meetings are over, but there’s still a lot of work to be done before the Education Governance Commission makes its recommendations to the province.
Carrie St. Jean, who is one of the commission’s co-chairs, said the group has a March 1 deadline and will be making recommendations for immediate, short-term and long-term changes.
“We want to see action,” she said.
In April, former education minister Doug Currie announced a governance review to look at issues facing the province’s education system.
That led to the creation of a five-member commission with St. Jean, who is a former P.E.I. Teachers’ Federation president, and UPEI Professor Bill Whelan as co-chairs.
Since November, the commission hosted five public discussions it called “community conversations” and three nights of public presentations across the province to get input from Islanders on what changes they think the education system needs.
About 120 people attended the public meetings and the commission also held 18 private meetings with key stakeholders.
St. Jean said the commission was happy with the level of discussion throughout the process and the public gave a wide range of opinions that included feedback at the end of every meeting.
“They felt they were heard,” she said.
Whalen said one of the themes that came out of the discussions was to look at an organizational structure that supports families of schools instead of boards.
Families of schools are those that are connected based around high schools.
All of the commission’s recommendations will have to be evidence-based and one of the ideas that came up during the discussions was a need to focus on knowledge-able students, Whalen said.
“Be able to find, integrate, to apply knowledge to the world around them rather than facts and information.”
The co-chairs also said they heard from people who thought principals need to be education leaders in schools.
Whalen said the commission posted notes from the community conversations online because it wanted the process to be transparent so anyone interested in the issue could access that information.
“Just basically in their raw form,” he said.
With the information gathered for the commission to review, Whalen said it now has to decide what recommendations it will make to the province.
“Now the real work begins,” he said.
Notes from the community conversations are available at www.peieducationgovernance.com and although the presentations are not available online yet, the commission plans to post them as well.
rross@theguardian.pe.ca
