Incoming Prairie South School Division director of education Tony Baldwin is excited to begin this new phase in his career as an educator in a time of historic change to the education sector in Saskatchewan.
Shortly after it was announced earlier this month that Baldwin would become the director of education for Prairie South effective this August, Saskatchewan Education Minister Don Morgan along with Saskatchewan School Boards Association (SSBA) president Janet Foord announced the implementation of the Education Sector Strategic Plan (ESSP). The ESSP is the first ever province-wide plan to be developed in co-operation with all education sector partners, approved by the 28 school boards in the province and accepted by the Government of Saskatchewan.
Baldwin said ESSP is a change from the Continuous Improvement and Accountability Framework that has been given from the ministry to school divisions for the past seven or eight years and names a series of things the ministry requires school divisions to be constantly improving. He said the ESSP is a new model that gets school divisions working together with the ministry to figure out what the areas are that each division has to address as they move forward to have a better education system in five years than there is now.
“School divisions are (now) in the process of developing something called a Level 2 plan, which will be sort of a school division specific response to the Education Sector Strategic Plan provincially,” said Baldwin. “It’s the first time since I’ve been an educator…that there’s ever been a single provincial improvement plan that is driven by school divisions rather than driven by the government.”
He said a good example of how education plans would be influenced by the specific context of the individual school divisions is graduation rates, which are one of the things that the education sector is trying to address provincially. Currently in Saskatchewan about 73 per cent of kids who start Grade 10 finish Grade 12 three years later, but in Prairie South that number is around 82 per cent.
Baldwin said the provincial goal is to have a province wide graduation rate of 85 per cent by 2020, so Prairie South may not need to focus on that as much as some other school divisions because they’re nearly at the goal already. That means the division could decide to invest some of the work at improving graduation rates into other areas.
The ESSP “is one of the things that is very interesting for me starting this job now (because) the school divisions are just working on their Level 2 plans that are aligned with the provincial strategic plan right now and those plans are going to extend to 2020, so really that’s the bulk of what’s left of my career,” said Baldwin. “It’s kind of neat to be able to start in a school division at the beginning of that planning process.”