The Regina Public Schools annual meeting of electors on Jan.28 will give the public an opportunity to participate in education planning by bringing up concerns and questions. The Board of Education will present to the public a report on what it has done since last year in an open forum.
“The point of the annual meetings is to share information,” said Terry Lazarou, supervisor of communications for
Regina Public Schools. Lazarou said that the public should be interested in attending the meeting because public education is important to the city.
“People pay taxes into their education system so they should have a say in how it is run and they should also have an understanding of what’s going on. This is an opportunity for them to find out firsthand about the progress over a year.” Lazarou said.
This meeting is going to be held at Regina Campus Public, so that people can see firsthand some of the new and innovative programs put in place.
Last year, the meeting was held at Arcola Community School. “The reason for that was to show off our new school,” Lazarou said. “We’re very proud of it.”
While Regina Public Schools infrastructure projects have seen the creation of new schools, a concern for many residents is the restoring of Connaught school, a building that has been around since 1912.
Rene Dumont, chair of the Save our Connaught Heritage Group, says that the group got started because the community did not support the school board’s decision to replace the building.
Support from the community to fix and keep the original building is growing since the board decided not to pursue heritage status. “Recently, a petition was circulated in the neighbourhood to see how much support there was for the cause and we have 1,800 people that have signed,” Dumont said.
According to the school board, it would be cheaper to replace Connaught but an engineer’s report said no decision should be made until further testing is done. However, there has been no word on when any testing will occur.
Save Our Connaught has recruited specialists willing to do the tests for free. “We’ve offered to go in during the holidays when there won’t be any students but they won’t let us into the building and we can’t figure out why,” Dumont said.
Dumont said the group is frustrated that there is a lack of progress into the issue.
“I think that they have made a decision without having all the facts and I think that it would be difficult for them to go back on what they have said before, but you can always be hopeful,” Dumont said.
Dumont and the Save our Connaught Heritage group is hopeful that discussion and progress will be made during the annual meeting.
“Connaught has been there 100 years and with a little bit of maintenance, it’ll be there 100 more,” Dumont said.
