Three months of hard work by Craik School drama students ended in a murder by the infamous prowler being thwarted in the school gym last Monday night.

Well, at least a fictional murder in the funny and entertaining 2013 Craik School Dessert Theatre play “Night of the Prowler.”

Janet Warkentin, co-director of the play, said the students involved in the school’s annual Dessert Theatre drama production put on a great performance in front of the over 100 people that crammed into the school gym to watch the play. She said it was especially hard to stage the play this year considering the winter weather conditions, but the students all pulled through and should be commended for their dedication to putting on a good show.

“They all worked really hard coming to practices and learning their lines,” said Warkentin. “With this year there was a lot of snow days, so we had less practices than usual, but we always seem to pull it off in the end.”

Whitney Ryan Garrity’s “Night of the Prowler” is a comedy-thriller that shines a spotlight on a group of scared family members and servants locked up in a mansion during a frightening thunderstorm while trying to decipher if someone amongst them is the murderous prowler that is stalking the people of Los Angeles.

The play opens with the extremely excitable maid Gertie (Megan Korchinski) reading a mystery novel before catching a glimpse of the prowler lurking outside. She lets out a scream and sets the play in motion. In rushes the stoic butler Fitch (Drayden Selinger) who finds a note that says the owner of the house, Burton Wingate (SkyAnn Stinson), will be murdered at midnight.

To read more please see the April 1 print edition of The Davidson Leader.

The grades 7 and 8 class at Craik School is trying to make a small change in the world.

The students have reformed the Upstanding and Outstanding (U and O) group at the school into a complex enterprise devoted to improving their lives and the lives of everyone they meet. By separating the organization into three divisions, namely a clothing, media and fund-raising group, the students have worked throughout the school year to engage the elementary students at Craik School as well as members of their community into becoming better people through applying eight simple concepts during their day-to-day lives.

“The characteristics are integrity, diligence, citizenship, respect, honesty, fairness, trustworthiness and responsibility,” said Kalib Vibert, a Grade 7 student who works with the clothing division. “You have to be all those to be an upstanding and outstanding person.”

Explaining that integrity means doing what is right even in tough situations, diligence is setting and reaching your goals, citizenship involves working for the common good, respect means treating others as you want to be treated, honesty is telling the truth, fairness concerns playing by the rules, trustworthiness is keeping your promises and responsibility means doing what needs to be done, the group has been implementing these concepts through their work this year on Free The Children initiatives.

Started by a then 12-year-old Canadian named Craig Kielburger in 1995 in an effort to fight child labour, Free The Children has grown into an international charity and educational partner with more than 1.7 million youth involved in education and development programs in 45 countries. The main goal of Free The Children is to create a world where young people are free to achieve their fullest potential as agents of change.

“We got involved with Free The Children so that people could have a sustainable source of clean drinking water,” said Grade 8 student Sky Ann Stinson, who is part of the media division. “We’ve raised $1,264 so far and now we’re thinking of sponsoring a village.”

Grade 8 student Chase Bakken, clothing division, said they haven’t decided which village to sponsor through the Free The Children Adopt a Village program, but have narrowed it down to a list of eight countries where help is needed.

To raise funds for the Adopt a Village initiative, the clothing division has designed an Upstanding and Outstanding logo that they will emblazon onto hoodies and ball caps they are making, which they will then sell to the student population at the school. They are also selling buttons to the community until Feb. 14.

“They’re called Love Is buttons and it’ll be sort of like a Valentine’s Day card,” said Haley Spencer, a Grade 8 student and fund-raising division member. “There are six different buttons and you can buy them and send them like a Valentine’s Day card.”

The media division is promoting these fund-raising efforts through their blog, facebook page and twitter account they developed this year.

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

The Craik detachment of the RCMP was a little bit busier in some areas and a lot less busy in others in 2012 compared to the previous year, while the Hanley detachment stayed on an even keel.
The number of break and enters reported or responded to by Craik RCMP went up to 15 incidents in 2012 from seven in 2011. Mischief to property stayed relatively the same at 29 cases in 2011 versus 30 in 2012. Assaults were cut in half in 2012 when only 14 were reported or responded to compared to 28 incidents in 2011. Assaults with a weapon or causing bodily harm went down by one in 2012 to two cases. There were no reports of aggravated assaults in either year.
The Hanley detachment once again had zeros across the board when it came to break and enters, mischief, assaults, assaults with a weapon or causing bodily harm and aggravated assaults, just as it did in 2011.
Cpl. Rob King, spokesperson for the RCMP, said the Craik and Hanley areas are normally very quiet and the numbers really don’t tell the whole story because they are variable.
“It’s impossible to explain why incidents go up or down,” said King. “One year you could have one house party where there are five assaults and that could bring the numbers up 50 per cent.”

Students at Craik School learned the importance of the interconnectivity of all living things last Wednesday through native hoop dancing as part of an ongoing effort by the school to provide students with an understanding of and connection to First Nations culture.

“With the hoops I connect all of the make-up-all, which represents the earth,” said Saskatoon hoop dancer Lawrence Roy Jr. “With the earth everything is connected to one thing or another, so one thing needs another thing to survive and therefore so on and so on. If you take one of those things out then the earth will fall apart. It won’t explode, but it will fall apart.”

Roy Jr. has been practicing different hoop dance styles like the great eagle and the prairie chicken for close to 25 years and now travels to schools throughout Saskatchewan where he teaches children about native culture and how to perform the hoop dance during workshops for each grade.

In Craik, he first performed a dance to traditional native music with 30 hoops for the whole student body in the gymnasium. During the dance he formed the eagle, flower, snake, butterfly and ball with hoops during the half-hour presentation as a way to demonstrate how everything is connected in some way to another.

Roy Jr. said he is not sure how those images came into place as the representation of all living things, as the dance’s origins go far back into the past, but he does see the benefit of using them to teach the message.

“The eagle is flying high up into the sky, so it can answer the prayers for all the people that are praying,” said Roy Jr. “The butterfly is for the beauty of the world. The flower is for the beautiful smells and everything that you experience throughout life. The ball represents all the different things that are around that you need to survive.

“When I was a kid I always used to try and sneak around like the army men and that is the thing you would have for the snake, a sneaky thing slithering into the next camp or something, so that person can scout better or go and see different scenes.”

Jody Kearns, a grades 3 and 4 teacher at Craik School, said Métis and native culture is a big component of their curriculum, so every year they try and come up with a way to try and enforce the importance of the First Nations to their students.

“Native and Métis culture is not something that is usually found in our area, so this was something for the kids to see and experience,” said Kearns, noting the workshops with the grades 1 to 8 students were the big part of the day. “It wasn’t just them seeing hoop dancing that I wanted. I wanted them to actually learn it and be a part of it so they have a connection and remember it.”

The 100 skaters who step on the ice at the Craik Rink each week are going to see the light this winter when a new ceiling and lighting is put in.

Jason Nolting, president of the Craik Rink Board, said the arena would be shutting down for around two weeks sometime this winter to install a suspended insulated ceiling and energy-efficient lighting over the rink’s ice surface. He said the improvements would come at a cost of over $68,000, with the cost split down the middle between the rink and funding through the federal government’s Community Infrastructure Improvement Fund (CIIF).

“It is really dark right now and as far as the users go and (new lighting) will be the biggest benefit,” said Nolting. “It will really brighten the place up. With the way the rink is built, it’s hard (to improve lighting). You could paint the rafters somehow, but if you know the rink it’s almost impossible to do that.”

Nolting said the suspended insulated ceiling would have a “foil back” with insulation on the other side, which will reflect light down onto the ice surface “so it doesn’t disappear into the building.” He said there are quite a few rinks that have had the upgrade done and it really makes a difference.

The Craik Rink, which has been in operation since 1949 after the previous rink was destroyed by a cyclone in 1945, had its ice put in last week and saw its first public skaters of the 2012-13 season Nov. 13. The senior men’s Craik Warriors hockey team uses the arena as its home rink, a number of kid’s hockey teams from other towns come to play in the rink almost daily and there is also a rec. hockey team that plays out of Craik.

Nolting said the rink board is raising the $34,000 for its portion of the upgrade through a volunteer farming initiative that is employed every year to raise money to keep the rink going. He said the rink “has some land” and receives help from local farmers in the seeding, spraying and harvesting of the field with the money going back to the operation of the rink.

“What I’m thinking is we have the (Warriors), so we’ll probably try to pick two weeks when they’re not playing at home or they can switch their games or something hopefully so they aren’t playing at home (to do the upgrades),” he said. “I’m hoping that they can get it done in two weeks and then we’ll be off to the races.”