Outlook, June 2013 1

June 2013A publication of the Outreach Education Council of the Alberta Teachers’ Association

UTLOOKOUTREACH EDUCATION COUNCIL

What’s Inside � Editor’s Message � Conference Update� Conference Poster Contest

Announcement� Summer Reading from Your ATA Library� Calgary Regional Report � Good News from Around the Province

Wow! Another year come and almost gone! The ocean of outreach education is always churning, with currents pulling both staff and students to and fro. Give yourself a pat on the back—you have done an amazing job!

Unfortunately, due to a low number of participants, OEC had to cancel the curriculum development workshop that was scheduled for May 4 at Barnett House. The OEC executive will be discussing a date to reschedule the module development (and sharing) day. Curriculum development is even more pressing now, given the funding cuts to Alberta Distance Learning. School boards will be reimbursed for only 44 per cent of the current credit enrolment units (CEUs) if they offer students Alberta Distance Learning courses, whereas they used to be reimbursed 100 per cent. Many outreach schools use these courses because they provide students with variety, choice and flexibility in meeting diploma requirements. Next year it will likely be fiscally impossible to offer these distance learning courses, and it is the students who depend upon ADLC’s nontraditional delivery who will suffer. I have received many inquiries about the exchange of modules across our OEC membership. If you are free to share materials with other schools, please send those materials to me or Clare Ganton, and please watch your e-mail for the rescheduled workshop date.

President’s Message We are a unique group of educators. The Outreach Education Council is a family connection for outreach teachers in Alberta; it is a network that likely doesn’t exist in your school because so many outreach schools are two- or three-teacher schools. The continual growth of nontraditional instruction ensures continued development of expertise and innovation in reaching at-risk students. OEC needs your expertise! Please consider joining the OEC executive and/or conference committee for the 2013/14 school year. Please have a colleague nominate you and send the nomination to Ihor Kruk (ihor.kruk@ata .ab.ca) if you are interested in becoming part of the most friendly and welcoming specialist council executive of them all.

Congratulations to your 2013 graduates, and best of luck to all students wrapping up their successes for this school year. I wish you all a most relaxing and rejuvenating summer break!

Kimberley Webb

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Editor’s Message This is our last newsletter of the regular school year, and I would like to thank everyone who has contributed to our newsletters this year. Everyone who has submitted reports or news stories from your schools and regions—

thank you! I think it is fantastic when we are able to share our concerns and successes with other people around the province who are facing situations similar to ours. Please continue to submit anything you think other outreach staff would enjoy. We will make sure to share as much as we can!

As we all know, with budget cutbacks and other struggles, it is more important than ever that we become strong voices for our unique schools and students. One way to become an advocate for outreach and alternative education growth in this province is to join the OEC executive committee. It is an excellent way to help promote the amazing things that are happening in our schools every day, as well as a way to influence the future of alternative education in Alberta.

I hope everyone has a wonderful summer and comes back rested and rejuvenated for the new school year. See you all at River Cree for the conference!

Clare Ganton

Conference Update As our school year starts to wind down, don’t forget to register for the OEC conference! Please check out our conference website, www.outreachcouncil.ca, for current information about online registration, our keynote speakers, planned sessions and other important information. As the conference gets closer, we will continue to update our website as more information becomes available. Please remember that registration for our conference can be done online only. Also, please remember to book your rooms at the Marriott at River Cree Resort as soon as possible.

If you have any town/city/company sponsors that you would like to invite to make a donation to our conference, please feel free to contact me at antonette.wilson@epsb.ca, and I will send you the forms with all the information. We are looking forward to another successful, fun and rejuvenating conference. Have a wonderful summer, and we look forward to seeing our old friends and meeting new ones at the OEC conference.

Antonette WilsonConference Director

Conference Poster Contest Announcement

The Outreach Education Council conference committee and executive congratulate Bryton Meneen on winning the OEC Conference Poster Contest. Bryton is a student of the Fort Vermilion School Division Learning Stores in High Level, Alberta. You can see Bryton’s artwork in this newsletter with the other conference information and on our conference website (www.outreachcouncil.ca).

Congratulations, Bryton, on winning an iPad Mini and having your artwork become the 2013 OEC conference logo!

Effective IMMEDIATELY, your annual no-cost specialist council membership will no longer

expire in August. Instead, it will continue year after year until you change it. To register

or change your council membership, log in at www.teachers.ab.ca with your TNET

username and password.

Specialist councils are your source for conferences, networking, publications,

resources, workshops, online communities and professional development.

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Calling All Outreach Teachers, Support Staff and Administrators!

Are you frustrated with the difficulties of finding outreach-specific professional development opportunities? Do you want to develop professional relationships with others working in outreach schools? If yes, consider attending our 16th annual outreach educators’ conference! It is an excellent opportunity to learn about the latest updates in outreach education, network with other outreach staff and examine issues affecting the outreach world.

WHEN—September 26, 27 and 28, 2013

WHERE—Marriott at the River Cree, Enoch, Alberta

THEME—“Success Outside the Box”

Please check our conference website, www.outreachcouncil.ca, regularly for updates and registration information.

If your outreach, your community or any other businesses would like to donate items for our conference, please contact Antonette Wilson, conference director, at antonette.wilson@epsb.ca for more information.

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Summer Reading from Your ATA Library With summer break around the corner, it’s the time of year when a teacher’s mind turns to thoughts of reading—professional development reading. Your ATA library is here for you—we have great books and articles on all aspects of professional development.

We are open for the whole summer (excluding weekends and statutory holidays) from 8:30 am to 4:30 pm and are always ready to help you find articles, videos or books on topics of interest. Don’t live in Edmonton? No problem—we offer the same great service no matter where you are in the province! We mail materials out to you at no charge and we prepay the return shipping, so there is no cost to you to use your ATA library. Just call us at 1-800-232-7208 or drop us an e-mail at library@ata.ab.ca, and we’ll get a shipment out to you right away.

Here is a brief list of just a few of the intriguing books we have waiting for you. • Bringing Innovation to School: Empowering

Students to Thrive in a Changing World• Differentiating Instruction for At-Risk

Students: What to Do and How to Do It • Ecoliterate: How Educators Are Cultivating

Emotional, Social, and Ecological Intelligence

• Exploring Web 2.0: Second Generation Interactive Tools - Blogs, Podcasts, Wikis, Networking, Virtual Words, and More

• From Inspiration to Red Carpet: Host Your Own Student Film Festival

• Oh Yeah?! Putting Argument to Work Both in School and Out

• Place- and Community-Based Education in Schools

• Physics Demonstrations: A Sourcebook for Teachers of Physics

• Pedagogies to Enhance Learning for Indigenous Students: Evidence-Based Practice

• Performing Science: Teaching Chemistry, Physics and Biology Through Drama and Role Play

• Redefining How Success Is Measured in First Nations, Inuit, and Métis Learning

• Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film• Teaching Thinking Skills• Text Complexity: Raising Rigor in Reading• Understanding Response to Intervention: A

Practical Guide to Systemic Implementation• Youth Gangs and Community Intervention:

Research, Practice, and Evidence

Don’t see anything here that catches your fancy? Well, give us a call or send an e-mail—we’re happy to find other materials for you. We also have access to two databases full of articles on hundreds of different topics; we can help you search in the databases or we can do the search for you and e-mail you articles the same day! You can also keep up to date with new titles in the library through our Twitter feed, which you can read by following @albertateachers on Twitter or by visiting our Twitter page, https://twitter.com/albertateachers.

On your summer vacation, be sure to visit our website (http://library.teachers.ab.ca) and check our Web Resources link—we link to hundreds of fantastic online resources that our library staff have personally reviewed.

We look forward to hearing from you this summer!

Sandra Anderson ATA Librarian

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Calgary Regional ReportWhat a provincial budget. What a framework. Now legislation. Wow—this has been quite the spring!

I’m sure everyone’s scrambling trying to figure out what’s going to happen next year ... How will this affect my outreach school? What about staffing? What about resources/ADLC? How will we meet the needs of our students? It was wonderful to hear of the support that continuation of work experience and special projects garnered at ARA. Reduction/elimination will certainly deplete an otherwise viable avenue for outreach youth. Thanks, Ihor and ARA delegates, for your work on this.

Certainly Calgary Board of Education was impacted by the provincial budget. It’s been four years in a row for tough budgets, with likely three more to follow. This year CBE decided to impose an 11.2 per cent cut at the high school level. Outreach was not immune—when all was said and done, it was more than 19 per cent for us. Our deficit, even after all temporary and probationary teachers were cut, was approximately the equivalent loss of 4.5 teachers. This is huge! We will lose relatively new teachers who are diligent, eager to explore possibilities and instrumental in organizing events and clubs. How unfortunate that these teachers will not be retained. Our new mantra is now “Do more, with less.” September will definitely be interesting and challenging. However, possibilities still abound.

Rocky View Learning Connection will have two retirements this year—Craig Schweisinger

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(principal) and Don Noble (student services). The focus is shifting to outreach students and less to distance education students. Airdrie, Cochrane and Chestermere are rapidly growing communities, and that’s reflected in the growth in outreach. This year’s enrolment was 450. The Airdrie site was moved to a smaller facility, located on Main Street. Because of easy access to bus routes, attendance has improved. There are approximately 50 students graduating, and about 23 of them planned to attend the ceremony on May 30. A Facebook page proved to be a great way to have graduates chat with one another. Next year all course work will be “in house”; Rocky View is not registering with ADLC.

Discovering Choices has had a very successful but busy year with projects led by youth councils at all four sites. One main goal for this year was fundraising for both local and global issues. Money was raised for Teen Angel, a local organization that ensures that youth who wouldn’t normally receive gifts for Christmas still get them. $1,500 was raised through Carolling for a Cause, a chocolate raffle, and painting and selling glass

ornaments. The Free the Children clean water initiative was chosen as the global issue/concern—to give communities in impoverished countries clean and reliable supplies of water for their villages. Producing and selling a cookbook, bake sales, art/craft sales, and raffles netted $1,500. That’s enough to ensure that 60 people have clean water for the rest of their lives! Our students were extremely enthusiastic and incredibly humbled to think that what they were doing could have such an impact at a basic human rights level. Our graduation ceremony was May 30. We have a combined total of 120 students, and 76 of them planned to attend the ceremony. Quite a “wow!” realization, considering our humble beginnings—one teacher and twenty-five students!

Our colleague Mike Good was a semifinalist for an Excellence in Teaching award, and our colleague Colin Hill received an Excellence in Teaching award. Congratulations to both!

In the words of our colleague Emily, “Let us enjoy a make-life-worth-living kind of summer!” See you at the conference.

Pat Cyca

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Good News from Around the ProvinceWelcome, New Outreaches!Please join our council and Alberta Education in welcoming the three new outreach schools that will be joining us this year:1. The Learning Connection—Evansburg is a

new outreach school in Grande Yellowhead Public School Division.

2. Outreach West, in Crowsnest Pass, is a new outreach school in Livingstone Range School Division.

3. La Crete Outreach, in La Crete, is a new outreach school in Fort Vermilion School Division.

Also, Medicine Hat School District has decided to split its outreach school into two parts, one for senior high students and the other for junior high.

Barrhead Outreach School—“Changing Our World, One Pancake at a Time!”The Barrhead Outreach School has won one of the seven Alberta Milk Nutrition Innovation Awards. We applied for the award and showcased our new Snacks and Foods program. Our outreach school has undergone a transformation in the last year with the introduction of healthy snacks to replace the chocolate bars, candy and pop that were available last year. We also introduced a cooking program in which students study nutrition and food preparation and earn high school credits. In December we had all staff and interested students complete the Alberta Health Services Food Safety Course to ensure we were following safe food-handling procedures.

We were encouraged by our FCSS family liaison worker and our FNMI counsellor and WRAP* coach to partner with the food bank to support the cooking and snacks program. Now we send volunteers to the food bank twice a week, for

work experience credits, and receive back eggs, milk, bread and other staples to cook with. We were also approached by the food bank in semester two to help out with a local elementary school’s Breakfast for Learning program. We prepare French toast, pancakes and muffins using ingredients from the food bank and freeze them, and a parent volunteer picks them up once a week.

We have seen increased attendance, better completion of work, improved peer relationships and overall a better learning environment from our changes. We will use the $1,000 award to purchase a better fridge, have a small luncheon to celebrate and use the rest to install a proper dishwashing sink (to replace the three plastic tubs we use now). Our partnership with the food bank has also improved our relationship with FCSS. We have students helping with the inaugural planting of a community garden and will participate with the FCSS gym nights next fall to complete activities and hours for the Physical Education 10 and 20 programs.

The official announcement of the award will be made in early June.

Joanne WallaceBarrhead Outreach Teacher

Petroleum Resource Studies and PetroChallenge 2013Next Step High School has created five one-credit Petroleum Resource Studies (PRS). PRS is perfect for outreach education. If you are interested in accessing Next Step’s PRS Moodle courses or in how this course was developed, please contact principal Paul Pallister at 780-464-1899 or paul.pallister@eips.ca.

Next Step is hosting PetroChallenge 2013, a two-day, interactive, team-based computer simulation event taking place October 29 and 30, 2013, at the Agora in Sherwood Park. First-place winners will represent Canada in London, England, at the international competition. Last year, there were more than 130 competitors, and our Canadian champions went on to England to win internationals. For more information on PetroChallenge and to view last year’s winners, please visit www.simprentis.com (editor’s note: accessed June 4, 2013). * Wellness, Resiliency and Partnership

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Outreach Education Council 2012/13

PresidentKim WebbBus 780-482-1407kimberley.webb@epsb.ca

Past PresidentShelly GurbaBus 780-675-2285shelly.gurba@aspenview.org

Vice-PresidentRichard WirthBus 780-459-6616rwirth@gsacrd.ab.ca

SecretaryCarol Van SlykeBus 780-624-5534vanslycj@prsd.ab.ca

TreasurerRoxanne EybenBus 780-969-8801roxanne.eyben@epsb.ca

Website ManagerClare GantonBus 780-980-0955clare.ganton@starcatholic.ab.ca

Conference 2013 Director

Antonette WilsonBus 780-479-3258antonette.wilson@epsb.ca

Communications DirectorClare GantonBus 780-980-0955clare.ganton@starcatholic.ab.ca

PEC LiaisonKevin KemptBus 403-289-2551kevin.kempt@teachers.ab.ca

ATA Staff AdvisorIhor KrukBus 780-447-9483 or1-800-232-7208ihor.kruk@ata.ab.ca

Alberta Education RepresentativeRon TaylorBus 403-297-5021rtaylor@gov.ab.ca

Calgary RepresentativePat CycaBus 403-268-3265pecyca@cbe.ab.ca

Copyright © 2013 by The Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA), 11010 142 Street NW, Edmonton T5N 2R1. Unless otherwise indicated in the text, reproduction of the material in Outlook is authorized for classroom and professional development use, provided that each copy contain full acknowledgement of the source and that no charge be made beyond the cost of reprinting. Any other reproduction in whole or in part without prior written consent of the ATA is prohibited. Outlook is published for the Outreach Education Council (OEC) by the ATA. Opinions expressed herein are not necessarily those of the ATA or the OEC. Editorial and production services: Document Production staff, ATA. Address all correspondence to Clare Ganton, 4906 50 Avenue, Leduc, AB T9E 6W9. ISSN 1705-1029.Individual copies of this newsletter are available at a cost of $2 per copy plus 5 per cent shipping and handling and 5 per cent GST. Please contact Distribution at Barnett House to place your order. In Edmonton, dial 780-447-9432; toll free in Alberta, dial 1-800-232-7208, ext 432.Personal information regarding any person named in this document is for the sole purpose of professional consultation between members of The Alberta Teachers’ Association.

Central RepresentativeKym Wasylik-NicollBus 780-853-2111

Edmonton RepresentativeMelissa ReidBus 780-464-1899melissa.reid@eips.ca

Northern RepresentativeBernadine SchroyerBus 780-532-3013bernadineschroyer@gpcsd.ca

Southern RepresentativeSteve MuirBus 403-362-4814msks@telus.net