The 2017-21 CSNO Board of Trustees. Left to Right: Trustee Stephanie Ambrose, Vice-President Roger Tremblay, President Sylvianne Maisonneuve, and Trustees Colin Gagnon and Madeleine Fortin-Bergeron. (Photo/CSNO)
The Conseil Scolaire du Nord-Ouest #1 (CSNO) recently held their organization meeting.
Trustee Sylvianne Maisonneuve, who represents the Falher area, was re-elected as the board’s president, while the new vice-president is Roger Tremblay of Grande Prairie.
Maisonneuve told the Trending 55 Newsroom some of what the board had planned for the coming term.
“We’ll be advocating for better funding for our schools,” she said. “As a rule and small school board, it becomes difficult to get adequate funding, and it’s not necessarily adequate to fulfill our needs.”
She adds that they hope to get added to the Alberta government’s Sunshine List in November in order to get funding to help out with a modernization project for École des Quatre-Vents in Peace River.
“We are hopeful we can get on this list,” said Maisonneuve. “We’ve been trying to get onto this last for the past few years now.”
In terms of attendance, the CSNO has been cautiously optimistic for this year.
“We had a growth rate of 2.4 percent,” said Maisonneuve. “So we saw an increase in numbers for all three of our schools. We cater to all of our rights holders, and our completion rates in our schools are very high.
“Our goal is to create sustainable bilingualism with our district,” she continued. “There are advantages to frequenting Francophone schools, and when parents buy in, our schools are a great environment to learn the French language, as well as the associated culture that goes with that.”
École Nouvelle Frontière in Grande Prairie and École Héritage in Falher currently offer Kindergarten to Grade 12, while École des Quatre-Vents currently only goes up to Grade 11.
“We’re working on getting (École des Quatre-Vents) up to K to 12 as well,” Maisonneuve said. “We’ve been adding on secondary classes on an annual basis for the past few years, and we hope that next year, we’ll have a graduating class coming from that school, which would make it more convenient than having to bus them to Falher.”
She says the community around the school in Peace River is quite happy with the way things are currently going.
– Posted by BET
