As the Southeast Cornerstone School Division is now operating in its second year with the former smaller school divisions now successfully amalgamated into one larger division, all former division lines have been erased; in the Weyburn area, there is no city division and rural division, it's all in one.

One of the effects of the amalgamation is that the school attendance boundaries which formerly existed for the 41 schools may not be relevant anymore. Under the former setup, each particular school division had the boundaries set up as would meet the local needs of the school and the families it serves.

This should still be the case, of course, as each school has its local group of students and families, but some of the school attendance areas can now be relaxed and readjusted in a way that makes sense.

Thus, the trustees will be starting to take a look at those boundaries and their relevance; at their recent board meeting, it was pointed out that in Regina and Saskatoon, all attendance boundaries were wiped out, so basically any family could attend any school they want within the city.

In a much, much larger and largely rural jurisdiction like Southeast Cornerstone, which literally covers the entire southeast corner of the province out to the Manitoba border, this may not be all that practical or possible.

In addition, having attendance boundaries at least provides students with a home school area, and for parents looking to be involved in a school community council, it will be clear which one they would belong to.

On the part of the schools, for their own budgeting and staffing purposes, they don't have to guess or wait until the students to show up before finding out how many students they will have; the numbers will be more or less known and manageable, and predictable. Otherwise, how would administrators know how many are coming?

Say, for example, a group of parents in the Haig School area wanted their kids in the more modern facility of Assiniboia Park, then Assiniboia Park could easily end up with far more students than they were built to handle, while a large facility like Haig could sit half-empty.

Mixed into this situation is the intention of the school board to look at all facilities with a view in the long-term to determine those which are "viable" or "non-viable"; aging structures that would extremely expensive to fix, like Haig School, may end up being closed with the students dispersed between Souris and Assiniboia Park - or, the board may determine that as the city is growing, they cannot afford to have a school closed.

If you're going to reconfigure boundaries, the board would also have to take into account where the population of children are centred, or could potentially be; for example, in Weyburn there are brand new houses being constructed in the neighbourhood of APES, which may have several families with children in the near future.

Clearly, this is an issue that will be simpler for some schools than others, but it will take research, and input from the families and stakeholders involved, so their needs and desires are considered as well. - Greg Nikkel