Monthly Archives: April 2014

Davidson

McRae trains to become branch service officer

To better help this area’s veterans and their families after the recent closure of the Veterans Affairs Canada (VAC) district office in Saskatoon, Royal Canadian Legion Branch #51 president Gord McRae is entering training to become a volunteer branch service officer.

A branch service officer assists veterans by identifying those with unmet health needs and any possible benefits they could receive from VAC and then making appropriate referrals to provincial command service officers. This branch-specific function became especially important after the Department of Veterans Affairs oversaw the closing of eight district VAC offices across Canada Jan. 31, including the one in Saskatoon, which provided face-to-face services for veterans.

“A lot of veterans are entitled to certain health benefits and…that’s where the service officer would come in,” said McRae, noting he is attending a branch service officer training session at the beginning of May and would become active in the role right after that. “There are a lot of (veterans) who are still alive that are old enough that they’re entitled to a lot of benefits. When they pass on, the families are. That to me is very important. They do a lot of extra for the veterans if they know how to apply for it. That’s where I’d like to see this all happen. It’s coming up more and more.”

The transition of the person-to-person contact between a veteran and their families with a qualified individual ready to identify and respond to the challenges facing them for an online self-service program is McRae’s main concern. He said a lot of veterans have difficulty filling out the complex online applications for services correctly and denying them this access to in-person help creates lengthy delays for these people getting the services they need.

“At least with the Veterans Affairs (offices) someone there knows how to fill it out and it’s done instantly or in a (short) time frame,” he said. “That’s important to the veterans or even the people that are involved…like doctors who want to do something for them.”

To read more please see the April 21 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Sports

Loreburn cheerleader comes back flying

Teryn Bristow is back flying with her Prairie Fire Cheerleading Senior Elite Diva team and feeling good about taking to the air again just a couple months after suffering a nasty injury while performing a stunt.

“It definitely scared me, but I got my courage back and got into it again,” said Teryn, a 13-year-old Grade 8 student at Loreburn Central School. “Now I feel comfortable. I trust my bases and I know that they’re going to catch me.”

Teryn suffered the injury during a “full out” practice with her stunt group in late January at the Prairie Fire Cheerleading gym in Saskatoon. She was flying in the air and doing a back flip into the stunt when an arm got caught and the rotation on her back flip stopped.

The young Loreburn flyer fell face first onto the mat with her feet arching over her head the wrong way. She was rushed to the emergency room at the Royal University Hospital and fitted into a neck brace.

“I was in the emergency room from 7 p.m. till 12:30 a.m.,” she said. “I took six weeks off from that injury because I had pinched nerves. I messed up my neck a bit and my back. I’ve just healed recently, so now I’m back into it.”

She made it back in time to help the Level 4 Senior team finish second at the ACE-All Star Cheer Extravaganza competition in Edmonton April 12 where she took her rightful place as the top of her stunt group.

Teryn said a top is the girl in a five-person stunt group that is thrown into the air. She said there are also two bases in a group who hold the top along with a third who stays behind the group to catch the top in case she falls and a fourth who stands in front to make sure the top doesn’t have a face fall.

“I like flying,” she said. “You get to do some cool things in the air and you get all the attention when you’re in a competition. You get to smile and sing to the music and it’s really fun.”

The All Star Cheer Extravaganza brought the 2013-2014 competitive part of the cheerleading season, which also saw the team perform at a competition in Anaheim, California, to a close for the Prairie Fire Cheerleading Senior Elite Diva team. Teryn is the youngest athlete in the 19-member club, which also includes tumbling, jumping and dancing sections in addition to the stunt group.

These four sections all take the stage in a competition to perform a two-and-a-half minute routine. To get ready for these demanding minutes on stage, the team participates in three two-and-a-half hour practices each week during the competitive season and also takes part in spring and summer training when not in competition.

To read more please see the April 21 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Davidson

Dundurn Centre faces delays

Construction of the Dundurn International Exhibition Centre will not begin this spring and no firm start date has yet to be presented.

Fred Wilson, Reeve of the Rural Municipality of Dundurn, said negotiations between the RM and Brightenview Development International Inc., which is building the massive wholesale outlet, are ongoing. He said they spoke to Brightenview April 8 and the company did not indicate when construction would begin.

“Everything is still progressing,” said Wilson. “It’s a multi-million dollar project and there is a lot of things that have to fall in place.”

Construction on the 155-acre site located a half-mile north of the Highway 211 and Highway 11 intersection on the east side of the highway was slated to begin in the fall of 2013 and last for 18 to 24 months. Once completed, the centre would potentially house 350 Chinese businesses that would sell wholesale products to buyers in North America and employ over 1,000 people.

“Everything is moving along,” said Wilson. “I’m not starting to get buck fever or anything. I think it is still going to happen, but it’s just taking a little longer maybe than what originally the plans were. Whether they’ll get started this summer, I can’t really (say). But I still feel quite confident that the project is still going to happen.”

In addition to the Exhibition Centre, Brightenview also pledged to help the community build a multi-million dollar community centre in Dundurn that would house a skating rink, swimming pool, hall and office space through a donation towards the costs of the project. Wilson said the new community centre is still in the plans.

“We’ve had some preliminary discussions on it, but we haven’t come up with all the financing on it yet,” he said. “It’s still part of the project.”

Wilson noted there are many people saying ‘I won’t believe it till I see it,’ but he is still confident the centre will become a reality. He said they are just not in a position to “put an exact date or timeline” on construction of it as of yet.

featured

Spring runoff water floods into Craik

The Rural Municipality and Town of Craik is coping with a deluge of water this spring that has already flooded a number of homes in the town, washed out two or three grid roads in the RM and is threatening to overflow the dam.

Hilton Spencer, reeve of the RM of Craik, said they have “piles of trouble all over” the area due to frozen ground, farmers draining sloughs, a drainage ditch around town that wasn’t cleaned out, quick warmth outside and a large amount of water runoff that their culverts could not handle.

“It’s different from last year,” said Spencer, noting there is water flowing over roads in several places in the RM and town. “We had more snow last year, but the ground wasn’t froze up (and) quite a bit of it soaked in. It got a little bit warmer (last week) and I think there is just an abnormal bunch of water in the snow this year.”

Craik Mayor Rick Rogers said their drainage ditch around the town overflowed the afternoons of April 8 and 9, which let water stream through the Craik School yard and down Ferguson Street flooding out some houses. He said residents of town could see the water coming before the floods hit when the temperature reached the teens in the middle of the week.

“There (are) probably six houses that are in trouble,” said Rogers. “They had a lot of water in their basement.”

Erin Stephens’ house on Ferguson Street was one of the homes affected.

She said late Tuesday afternoon water was pouring in through the basement windows.

“By 4:30 p.m., walking in our driveway, water was up to our knees.”

Besides flooding their basement, water also flowed into their garage. She said by 10 p.m. Tuesday they had cleaned up the water in the basement. Then Wednesday afternoon more runoff came into town from the fields to the west flooding the Stephens home and others on Ferguson once again.

Their finished basement sustained water damage and many items in the basement and garage are wrecked.

She said their insurance doesn’t cover flood damage. She hopes the town will provide compensation.

“We’ll be expecting the town to do something for us, but nobody has told us anything yet,” she said.

She and her husband and two kids have lived in the house for 10 years and this is the first time they’ve been flooded.

“It’s frustrating because it could have been prevented,” Stephens said, referring to the town not cleaning out the drainage ditch in front of her home.

To read more please see the April 14 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Davidson

Teen pledges locks to aid sufferers

Sarah Nykiforuk, 17, has decided to make a difference in the lives of those suffering from mental illness and cancer.

Sarah is running an online donation campaign to raise $1,000 by June for the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA). She is also pledging to cut her long golden hair shortly after she reaches that goal and donate it to a foundation that makes wigs for financially disadvantaged people suffering from cancer.

“I’ve set up a page on the Canadian Mental Health Association website (www.cmha.ca), so people can go on it and search for ‘Sponsor Sarah Nykiforuk,'” said Sarah, who is a Grade 12 student at Davidson School. “If people want to pay with cash or cheque they can give those to me and I could enter their cash or cheque onto the website and they would get a tax-deductible receipt for any donation they contribute.”

Sarah began her campaign to raise funds for the CMHA on April 2, which is Autism Awareness Day, because of her interest in the brain development disorder and the new options medical personnel are using to help people touched by it. However, she said the decision to go forward with the fund-raising campaign happened near the beginning of the school year when she became more serious about supporting the overall cause of better treatment of mental illness.

“I’ve met a lot of people who have struggled through different mental health issues such as bipolar disorder and depression and I’ve just seen the ways those issues have affected them and their families,” she said. “Those are people that I’ve seen who’ve been getting help. I know there are a lot of people out there who aren’t getting help and if I can have some part in helping them to have access to that I really want to.”

During her campaign, Sarah is also spending time researching different charitable organizations to find one she could donate her shorn hair to when she cuts it in mid-June.

To read more please see the April 14 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

Davidson

Pool committee plans for fun auction

The Davidson Swimming Pool community auction being held this Thursday at the Davidson Rink is shaping up to be one of the biggest fund-raising projects the new pool committee has held to date.

Jessie Foster, a member of the new Davidson Swimming Pool committee, said there will be a full bar, midnight lunch, appetizers, door prizes, a silent auction and the main live auction during the evening. She said the cost to get in to the adult-only event is a $10 charge at the door, which covers the midnight lunch and entry into the door prize contest, but the chance to bid on some of the hundreds of “amazing” donated items is worth the price of admission in itself.

“We’ve got quite a variety,” said Foster, noting more auction items are still coming in. “We’ve got everything from meals to the field and homemade baking to services like Bobcat (Landscaping) or trucking to spa packages, concert tickets, flight packages and Rider tickets. We really have a good variety of items for everybody.”

Foster said the committee has raised close to $500,000 so far solely through fund-raising events and community donations. She said to reach their goal of having $1.3 million by 2015 they are going to begin focusing on applying for grant money to try and find some funding from outside the community to get closer to the final total.

In the meantime, the committee is taking a closer look at the initial plans of the new pool design and would be getting some technical drawings made up. Foster said once everything is ready they’d like to invite the entire community to an open meeting to take a look at what is being proposed along with a breakdown of the costs.

She said after the auction the committee is planning on holding a spring bottle drive. There are a few other community events in the works as well, but for now they’re concentrating their efforts on putting together an enjoyable evening this Thursday at the Rink and hoping for a good turnout from members of the community.

“We are going to have fun surprises during the auction that I think people are going to enjoy,” said Foster. “It’s going to be a fun evening to come out and bid and socialize and have a good time.”