Superintendent of schools for the Campbell River School District (SD72), Tom Longridge, says staff have been busy over the summer getting schools ready to welcome students through their doors this week.
“A lot goes on when everybody feels like they’re on holiday,” Longridge says, “but there’s a lot of things happening with facilities and tech throughout the summer.”
As a result of all that hard work, the district is fully staffed and ready to get back to work preparing our kids for tomorrow.
In his most recent blog post on the district’s website, Longridge welcomes students back to class and calls the opening of the current school year “an exciting time of change.”
He says that although the government has changed and the operation of school districts province-wide are now overseen by Minister of Education Rob Fleming and Deputy Minister Scott MacDonald, “our fundamental purpose and goal remains unchanged: to ensure that all learners in our school communities are given the best opportunity to experience success and to feel prepared to excel in a constantly changing world.”
To that end, Longridge says, while students were on a well-deserved break, district staff have been working extremely hard over the summer to prepare our schools for their return in September, highlighting various roofing projects and the seismic upgrading of Cortes Island School as some of the major work accomplished.
Longridge also says the Board of Education of SD72 decided last year that they would be investing in a whole new wireless infrastructure and a stockpile of tablets to make use of it, and the rollout of that plan is complete – at least in the elementary schools.
Longridge says they have distributed at least 120 tablets to elementary teachers throughout the district to get them familiarized with their use before making them available to the students. Then the middle and secondary schools will get theirs.
But in order for those to be put to use, the district’s wireless system needed an overhaul, which Longridge says was completed this summer, as well.
“It’s been a whole refresh of our entire WiFi system throughout the district that will be certainly noticeable to people accessing our network,” Longridge says. “It should be faster and much more robust. The tech department has been working very hard to get that done and get it up and running before school opens and they’ve done a fabulous job over the summer.”
Longridge also says the Board of Education will be looking to “engage parents, students, staff and the greater community as we build our third Strategic Plan,” in the coming weeks and months, including “reaching out to our rural communities of Quadra, Cortes, Read Island and Sayward for discussions on how we can work together to ensure that those rural school communities remain vibrant and responsive in the future.”