PRINCE ALBERT — The Saskatchewan Rivers School Division saw improvements in their community engagement in 2024-25, according to a recent report.
Superintendent Garette Tebay presented the community engagement annual report at the division’s June 16 school board meeting. The report focused on the work being done to promote learning and development with the school division’s partners.
Tebay said the year in communication in Saskatchewan Rivers was positive.
"It's been nice this year, I added our community partnerships, such as KidsFirst and the Family Resource Centre, to my portfolio, which really helps consolidate some of the work as well, especially in early learning,” she said.
The report highlighted community partnerships such as KidsFirst and the Prince Albert Early Years Resource Centre and others.
KidsFirst has Sask Rivers as an accountable partner and the division assists with HR, financial and leadership support to enhance targeted supports for families with children under the age of three.
Sask Rivers is also an accountable partner for the Prince Albert Early Years Family Resource Centre and a staffing partner. The division also provides HR, financial, and leadership support to enhance targeted services for vulnerable families, helping them in their transition to kindergarten and pre-kindergarten.
Tebay said that the year included many highlights, but she pointed to one specific engagement exercise.
"I would say our Feb. 6 engagement day with the SRSC (Saskatchewan Rivers Students for Change) and our SCCs and our school principals. That day is always a highlight of the year. Getting to have all those voices in the room and getting to consolidate the ideas from all of our shareholders around our Strategic Plan,” Tebay said.
The engagement session had 70 people attend, with a variety of voices represented.
In addition to the partnerships, the report also focused on SRSC, the group responsible for selecting rural and urban student representatives.
The SRSC also had a positive year, according to Tebay.
"I feel like they've come back over COVID with doing online meetings and not being able to get together and really become a cohesive group this year,” she said. “We had really great leaders that had been in the group since Grade 10 that were now in Grade 12.”
The group was represented at the board table by urban representative Coral Frenette and rural representative Taylor Henderson.
"The students in the group took a real pride and honour in the work that they were doing and in the work that they did to ensure that it was an inclusive group where everybody's voice was heard,” Tebay said.
The Saskatchewan Rivers School Division board of education and Saskatchewan Rivers Students for Change (SRSC) have both advocated for the discontinuation of the departmental exams. The exams were discontinued for 2025-2026 according to an announcement from the province earlier this year.
Finally, the report gave an overview of the Division communications for the 2024-25 school year. According to a school division press release, the division's Facebook page has grown to have 2,791 followers, and the Instagram account is now up to 410 followers.
"Our social media engagement has gone up considerably over the year and I would say the quality as well of our campaigns has improved. Just as we learn more, we get to do better,” she said.
Earlier this month, as staffing changes were announced on Facebook with new principal and vice principal appointments, the division saw these have great uptake on social media.
Tebay explained that all of the uptake on Facebook opened up a way to create even more engagement.
"It’s a metric that you can see that the work that you're doing is having an impact and so the impact through Meta is that they are distributing our information to a wider audience because of the quality of it,” she said.
