The board of trustees for the School District of Mystery Lake (SDML) met for the final time during the 2017-18 school year on June 26.
Since they were on the cusp of taking their summer break, and only four days away from saying goodbye to retiring trustee Janet Brady, the board aimed to wrap up as much outstanding business as they could during this hour-long meeting, as well as find some time to hear from members of the community.
Spirit Wolves presentation
The delegations and presentations section of the meeting featured members of the Spirit Wolves racing team, who recently returned from the F1 in Schools competition in Austin, Texas.
This team is composed of students from R.D. Parker Collegiate who had been perfecting their small model cars, which are made of balsa wood and powered by carbon dioxide (CO2) cartridges, since October 2017.
While the team won’t be moving on to the world finals in Singapore, design engineer Miles Stillie told the school board that they still managed to place sixth and win the competition’s Scrutineering award.
“So, what the Scrutineering award is is it means our car followed the rules the most out of the other cars,” said Stillie, referencing the team’s rigorous attention to detail when it came to design specifications. “Their cars were still a lot faster than ours … our time was 1.6 [seconds] they got like 1.1 or 1.2. So we’re a little behind on the speed.”
Regardless of the outcome, team manager Ashutosh Agarwal said they still learned a lot during this trip and got exposed to some interesting new design ideas that they can carry forward into future competitions.
“We had a great experience while we were down there,” said Agarwal. “We met a lot of teams … not only competing in the F1 competition, but in the Jaguar 4x4 competition as well. We got to see some cool car designs.”
Other business
Following this section of the meeting, members of the board rattled through some other important housekeeping items.
To start, co-superintendent Lori Henderson talked about how T2 Thompson Toddlers Daycare is requesting permission to expand their operations into one of one of the local schools.
While Henderson said there might be space at Deerwood or Juniper School, she noted that T2 is the third Thompson daycare to submit this kind request in recent memory.
This information comes in the wake of the SDML’s February budget meeting, where chairperson Don Macdonald said they won’t be able to support many full-day kindergarten programs as of the 2019−20 school year.
During the correspondence section of the meeting, Macdonald also went over a letter sent by Minister of Education and Training Ian Wishart.
While the Manitoba government remains steadfast in their plans to whittle down the province’s 38 collective bargaining units into one streamlined model, Wishart wrote that any legislation designed to advance this initiative won’t come into effect until at least the fall of 2018.
“In the interim, we would encourage collaboration between all parties on a functional transition approach, with the aim of facilitating the most orderly and effective approach to local bargaining under the current model,” wrote Wishart.
Finally, secretary-treasurer Kelly Knott reminded everyone in attendance that information pertaining to the 2018 school trustee election is now posted on their official website.
According to Knott, anybody looking to run in this election can register up until Sept. 18, with voting set to take place on Oct. 24.
The first board of trustees meeting of the 2018−19 school year is scheduled for Sept. 11.
