Public engagement on the Kelly Road Secondary School renaming process is almost over.
Next Wednesday (April 22) at 6 p.m., School District No. 57 (SD57) will hold a forum to present a summary report of the public’s feedback and ideas regarding the proposed renaming for the new school building to Shas ti Secondary.
This is set to take place online and can be viewed via livestream on SD57's website.
Engagement data is being collected since March 20 from a public engagement questionnaire that was available online, through printed copy and phone-in responses, which will be shared in an executive summary with Board Trustees.
Information will be received at the meeting, and then published on the SD57 website for public review.
It's set to include an executive summary, aggregate quantitative data on closed questions and verbatim qualitative responses from the public’s open-ended question responses.
“We appreciate that this is a highly anticipated stage in the engagement process,” says SD57 Board Chair Tim Bennett in a news release.
“It is for Board Trustees, as well. We have seen and received so much direct feedback, from public protest to heartfelt emails, and we are eager to see some of the trends and themes in the data from this questionnaire.”
The last day for the public to provide purposeful input into the SD57’s participation questionnaire is this Friday (April 17) with the KRSS naming decision set to come down on April 28 during the board's next public meeting.
The online, printed copy and phone-in response engagement platform was developed to hear from the public in an accessible forum and receive ideas on how to preserve the past (Shas Ti) and present (Kelly Road) in its new building scheduled to open in September.
SD57 says there are more than 2,200 responses collected from the questionnaire.
“It has been a challenging engagement process, largely due to circumstances outside of our control, and we anticipate that this decision will help us move forward together,” says Bennett.
Public forums, which were to take place throughout the community, had to be moved to an electronic format to accommodate social distancing required by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Students, staff and the community will have a new state-of-the-art learning facility by September 2020, and it’s time to embrace the collective opportunities ahead of us."
