1. Please provide a short biography. Why have you chosen to run for trustee?
I am born and raised in Medicine Hat, with a long family history in this community. I am married with two children. Over the years I have been active in various organizations and boards around the community and have a real local focus.
I am running for trustee because I feel we need more accountability, transparency and refinement in our policies, we need to provide locally grown solutions to help our district thrive and education system flourish with better and equal educational opportunities across the district, with more collaboration with our stakeholders in the community and we need to be more transparent, accountable and accessible in how we communicate.
2. What are your top three priorities for your division, and how would you work to meet those needs?
1.)Communication: We have a lot of ways we can improve our communication in the district. There is not consistency in the district and we can fix this easily with the technology we have.
This includes measures such as :
-Creating Policy and resources for proper training and procedure.
-Encouraging and ensuring adequate accessibility and transparency by public access and recording of all district meetings, school council meetings, and better trustee and district online access to public records of both in consistent ways across the district that align with the standards of practice in the province.
-provide better resources for school councils for training and fundraising. There are opportunities that exist in the community that can be done as a division so as to encourage collaboration and support for multiple schools to work together to achieve a better solution to fundraising fatigue.
2.) Fix policies in the division to better protect the division. We have a lot of policies that need to be updated, and we need to protect from potential abuses and conflicts, along with be more thorough in guidelines.
3.) Collaborate towards growing a more resilient and sustainable equally accessible school division. We can make better and wiser investments into our schools so we can provide better education opportunity, better facilities usage, and growth in programming with widening our community partners and programs.
3. How would you aim to attract and retain students within your division?
Strategic division wide measures and smart investments in our local schools while still growing special programs with more community involvement and partnerships.
