Message from the Director

Welcome to Keewatin-Patricia District School Board’s 2024 director’s annual report. This year marked an incredible journey of new beginnings, reaching much-needed milestones, and challenging ourselves, students, and staff to be our best selves and prepare students to achieve their dreams. In June of 2024, the board of trustees approved our new 2029 multi-year strategic plan. We focused our mission and vision on Mino-bimaadiziwin, leading a good life, mind, body, and spirit and committing to ensuring our students reach their full potential and are prepared for their future. We committed to helping students find their strengths, address their needs, and achieve their dreams. Framed in three pillars, inclusive engagement, optimizing resources, and elevating student success.

We aligned this commitment with a strategic operational plan committed to action. Inclusive engagement represents our first pillar in the 2029 MYSP. We at KPDSB know that for learning to occur, students need to feel safe, competent, welcome, hopeful, and be meaningfully engaged in their class and school community. Above all, they need to be present, and that begins with us. The 2023-2024 school year marked our second student census and climate survey. With our highest participation rates ever, we learned more about who our students are and what at school makes them feel safe and welcome and keeps them engaged. We also learned about where we need to improve.

This information helped us to craft the work in our inclusive engagement pillar where you will hear about staff, students, and parents and caregivers connecting with author and researcher Hannah Beach to better learn how to connect kids with staff, other students, and their learning environment. You will hear about our strategic evidence-based attendance plan aimed at decreasing the number of KPDSB students that are chronic non-attenders as well as those that are at risk. You will also hear how we are collecting and engaging student voice in new ways to better serve students and communities, including centering First Nations student success across our entire student achievement plan with direct input from our advisory committee on our indigenous education board action plan.

We continue to be committed to truth through cultural experiential learning opportunities and reconciliation through continued staff learning and making systemic changes to reduce and remove barriers and support indigenous student success across our system. In this report, you will hear from staff and students about the impact of these learning opportunities and changes in our system. The pillar elevating student success represents our commitment to improved student achievement. Our math achievement action plan was launched in January 2024 and is a primary area of focus for our MYSP. Explicit teaching, fluency development, recall and retrieval, and developing thinking and application skills grounds our strategy coupled with rigorous data collection and analysis.

Utilizing the Star Freckle screener system helps teachers target areas of need in their students and address those with explicit teaching and intervention strategies. In this annual report, you will hear from teachers and students about the use of Spring to develop fluency in math facts and explicit teaching that utilizes recall and retrieval to assess student understanding. You’ll also hear teachers talk about professional development that has transformed their teaching in math and our students demonstrate and explain how they are learning math and using it in their classroom. Early successes include an increase in grade three mathematics EQO scores across the board. This year’s efforts include developing a scope and sequence for K to10 mathematics curriculum, continued focus on explicit instruction, and further development of instructional leadership and math.

In literacy, our primary focus this school year was expanding our practices in the science of reading to our secondary panel and our destreamed grade nine and ten English. In this annual report, students and staff discuss the use of tier one and two tier intervention tools lexia and empower in grade nine to ensure literacy skills are developed across the curriculum. In this report, you will also hear from principal Holly Szumowski about the successes Sioux North High experienced in significantly increasing its graduation rate and how this will translate into practice shifts across our system. In continuing the theme of preparing our students for their future, we hear from our expanded program staff in experiential learning, skilled trades, OYAP, co-op, and SHSM. You’ll also hear about the immediate and lifelong impact of these opportunities at KPDSB from current and former students.

Learning does not end at 18 and the education journey is not linear for all. At KPDSB, we welcome adult learners to our adult education program and our site monitors discuss the rewarding experiences they share with adult learners daily. Our adult education validictorian describes her own education journey that ended with her as a proud graduate and validictorian of the class of 2024 at 48. Optimizing resources represents the final pillar in our 2029 multi-year strategic plan. In the 2024 school year, the facilities department began the implementation of our facilities restructuring plan designed to ensure we have safe, clean, effective, and efficient facilities for students to learn, grow, and explore in. The facilities department underwent significant changes this year.

This included the addition of two service quality supervisors and a data management officer. Perhaps the most significant change is the shift to daytime custodians in each school. This role ensures that school staff and administration can focus on teaching, learning, and instructional leadership rather than on school maintenance. You will hear from custodians and administrators about the positive impact this change has had on our learning environments. Significant capital upgrades were made across our system as we modernize our learning environments, and you will hear capital planning officer Steve Parker detail the extensive work accomplished this year. These are just a few highlights of a year and a director’s annual report packed with new learning, direction, and action to achieve our goals.

This year’s director’s annual report includes voices from across our system and demonstrates the collective impact of our work at KPDSB and our commitment to mino-bimaadiziwin, helping our students achieve their dreams and prepare for their future.