The Holy Family Roman Catholic Separate School Division will hold Catholic Education Week on May 9-16, and will hold service awards for staff virtually as part of that week’s celebration.
The week will be part of a provincial proclamation, noted education director Gwen Keith, and each day during the week will see different activities held in the schools.
She added that this year, the board of trustees will not be involved in face-to-face activities as they are most years, due to the COVID-19 restrictions currently in place.
“We’re very excited about how the week will work,” said Keith.
There will be videos shown in the respective schools of the staff being honoured this year.
Two teachers will be retiring this year, Donna Berling and Natalie Regier, both from St. Michael School in Weyburn.
For the service awards, five-year awards will be given to Dean Loberg, Martina Veneziano, Jessica Bath, Roy Rains and Rhonda Sandquist.
Ten-year awards will be presented to Sean Galvin, Kaitlyne Graham, Sabrina Gulka, Brianna Rezansoff, Coline Smetaniuk, Shannon Culy and Trina Kopec.
Service awards for 15 years will go to Michelle Walkedene, Sarah Kot and Becky Tuchscherer.
Awards for 20 years of service are going to Carrie Horack, Kari Erb, Angela Giroux, and Jerome Sidloski (trustee), and a 30-year award is going to Lana Reich.
• In other board business, the trustees looked over the results of surveys taken of staff and parents in the Holy Family school division, with the granular detailed results sent to each respective school.
The surveys were taken in March, and asked staff how their personal wellness is faring during COVID, and what the school division might do differently to help them.
“Overall, the staff are reporting pretty strong wellness,” said Keith, noting the staff listed various ways of maintaining wellness such as exercise, and having different routines.
“It gave us some ideas of how to support the staff,” she said. “We don’t see a lot of strong heavy recommendations to do something different than what we’re doing now.”
She added that staff are appreciative of the wellness day implemented for the staff.
“People feel they are being kept as safe as they can be, and this is a real celebration of how we listen to what the teachers have said,” said Keith.
Responses on student wellness wasn’t as strong, she added, noting that “socialization is perhaps the hardest hit for everyone.”
Socialization was also raised in the parents survey as a concern, and Keith said she wants to have a meeting with school-community council presidents and principals to look at creative ways they might be able to address this issue.
