School District 47 (SD47) has applied to become a provincial online learning school.
At the Powell River Board of Education meeting on December 15, superintendent of schools Dr. Jay Yule said the provincial ministry of education has determined that any school district with a distributed learning or online program, if continuing to support students outside the catchment area is desired, needs to apply to the ministry to be an online learning school.
“We are one of the larger online programs that serves students outside of our catchment area,” said Yule. “It’s about 800 students that we serve, so with the teachers, administrators and parents we have, there is encouragement for us to be a provincial program, so we will be applying. We are working on the application process to fill out the template, which is really quite comprehensive.”
Yule said the district will be submitting the application within the week and waiting to hear if it is one of the chosen programs that will have a provincial designation.
“We don’t know how many there will be,” said Yule. “There are more than 50 programs in the province right now. Almost every district supports their own distributed learning and many support outside of their catchment areas.
“We’ll put in our application. We think it looks very strong but we’ll have to wait and see what that looks like. We have a lot of letters of support from parents in the program that we’ll include in our application.”
Board chairperson Dale Lawson asked how many districts were being chosen to be online learning schools.
Yule said at first the ministry said there were going to be seven, but now it is indicating more will be involved.
“We have a very good chance because we serve so many students outside of our catchment,” said Yule. “It would leave a number of students without programs in some pretty remote areas that don’t offer programming. We’ve done it for such a long time compared to some others, but you never know what the thinking is within the ministry.”
Yule said he spoke to a number of his colleagues who won’t be applying because they don’t have a high number of students outside of the catchment area involved in distributed learning.
“In that case, why would you, because there is another layer of accountability and work?” said Yule. “You can still operate distributed learning under your own school district under different guidelines, so it only really makes sense for districts that have a lot of students outside of their catchment areas. It seems that most don’t.”
According to correspondence from the ministry of education, provincial online learning schools must have the infrastructure in place to provide province-wide equitable access and support services for all learning needs. These schools, according to the correspondence, will provide high-quality online learning programs to students anywhere in BC, and offer online learning resources, best practices and training programs to other boards of education and to independent school authorities.
