By Sarah Pledge Dickson
Local Journalism Initiative
The Eastern Townships School Board (ETSB) met Tuesday in its first meeting of 2024. Council members attended to go over the previous year in review and look ahead to the rest of the school year.
Kandy Mackey, director general of the board, read the annual report for the school year of 2022-2023. She noted the former director general Michael Soucy who returned the position to Mackey in 2023.
“Last year was the year that our former director general Michael Soucy ended his five-year tenure,” Mackey says. “We express our deepest appreciation for his commitment and his unwavering support of our school board.”
She also mentioned the expansion of Farnham Elementary School.
“We still continued a lot of investments, one being Farnham Elementary School that had a remarkable addition,” Mackey says.
Commissioner Joy Humenuik adds that the expansion has integrated the community more than ever.
“Since we’ve done the renovations and upgraded the school there, the town of Farnham has approached them to use it for activities that are overflowing in other places,” Humenuik says. “So, the community will be in the school more than it has been in the past.”
Chairperson Michael Murray addressed the appointment of a new director general of the Quebec English School Board Association (QESBA), David Meloche. One of the first items on their agenda is Bill 96. He says that the QESBA will deposit a contestation of the bill, stating that board believes the Office québécois de la langue français is looking at the bill very narrowly.
“The Office québécois de la langue français is taking an exceedingly narrow interpretation of the law that excludes English education from the application of the Bill 96 provisions,” Murray says. “And so we are forced to once again apply to the courts for a more liberal interpretation of the law.”
A meeting will be held Friday with the labour relations committee.
“The chairman and director general of each of the English school boards will be hearing a presentation from the negotiating team,” Murray says. “They will be required to vote on and either accept or reject the proposed settlement that is currently being presented to the various union groups.”
Megan Seline, former president of the Appalachian Teacher’s Association, posed a question to the board regarding the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) in schools. Murray responded to the inquiry positively.
“At the board here, we’ve been working to introduce the benefits of artificial intelligence for more than a year now,” he says, “since it began to show promise as a powerful education tool.”
He notes that there are no specific curriculum changes being discussed at the moment, but that the technology is promising.
“I’ve seen some demonstrations that are both dramatic and very promising in terms of how much teachers and students can benefit from introducing elements of artificial intelligence like chat bots and search engines,” Murray says.
ETSB teacher Adam Brody posed a question regarding the recent power outage and students who continued to attend school despite the buildings not having power. He raised concerns about the protocol for power outages.
“There seems to be some confusion from a lot of the teachers in the area in regards to what the procedures are when the power does go out for an undetermined amount of time,” Brody says.
Murray reassured meeting attendees that procedures are in place and were implemented properly.
“In a recent outage in Sutton, we chose to keep the school open because the school building itself was warm,” he says. “There’s adequate natural lighting through the windows and there was city supplied running water.”
He says that power was restored by noon and that the largest problem encountered was students having cold lunches.
“Our first concern is safety first,” Murray says. “There’s no question that our priority is to keep students safe and to ensure that there are adequate resources.”
Murray also reiterated how important it was for students to be at school given recent absences due to strikes.
“We felt that it was important to do whatever we could to minimize any further loss of time,” he says.
A motion was passed to invest $150,000 in audio and visual technologies including replacing existing SmartBoards with the latest interactive classroom technology: smart TVs.
Next week is bus safety week across the province.