Back in late April, Thompson residents were given the chance to sound off on the province’s ongoing kindergarten to Grade 12 education review during an interactive workshop at Westwood School.
On May 3, a trio of students from R.D. Parker Collegiate got the same opportunity at a youth forum in Winnipeg that featured representation from virtually every other school district in the province.
For around six hours, Kyle Tomchuk, Rishwan Dherdi, Serenity Katchmar and roughly 80 other Manitoba students separated into smaller groups to compare notes on the various challenges that are affecting their respective schools.
“Everyone started out very shy, but 10 minutes in the flow at the tables picked up instantly,” said RDPC teacher Michael Thorbourne, who served as the trio’s chaperone during the trip. “That room just buzzed with the ability of the different students.”
Despite their geographic differences, the various groups quickly found out that they shared a lot of the same overlapping concerns about the province’s education system, especially in areas like mental health resources and the fear of amalgamating the province’s different school boards.
The May 3 forum included appearances from education review committee members like Terry Brown and Avis Glaze, which means that students were able to bring their concerns directly to the Manitoba government.
Dherdi said she was particularly happy to get a chance to meet with Glaze, since she’s serving as the committee’s lead consultant.
“She came around and opened up a lot to us,” said Dherdi. “She had a lot of opinions and asked ours and she was writing notes. I think at our table she wrote down about two-and-a-half pages of notes.”
While all three RDPC students admitted that they felt the event was much too short, they still exchanged contact information with their fellow attendees and made some invaluable connections that will come in handy for the future.
“All the students had a good sense of where we’re at in the educational system, where the adjustments need to be made,” said Tomchuk. “So I believe that it’s on our government to address these suggestions that we bring forward and do their best to make sure that all these needs are being met for generations to come.”
The education review commission expects to publicly release their final report and recommendations by March 2020.
Education and Training Minister Kelvin Goertzen previously told the press that this is the first review of its kind in half-a-century and that “nothing is off the table” when it comes to improving the province’s school system.
