Saskatchewan’s NDP Opposition says the provincial government needs to provide $50 million in emergency funding to school divisions before budgets are finalized at the end of the month.

Opposition education critic Matt Love held a news conference outside Saskatoon’s Aden Bowman Collegiate.

Love and the NDP want the government to help divisions avoid cuts to jobs and programs.

Some school divisions have also added fees to parents for lunchroom supervision for the upcoming year.

He said there is still a little time left in the school year for Minister Dustin Duncan to submit some quality work to get back to a passing grade while calling on Minister Duncan and Premier Scott Moe to commit to an emergency funding package for Saskatchewan schools in the amount of $50 million.

Love said the province cannot afford to wait months before acting.

A handful of Saskatchewan school divisions, including Saskatoon’s public and Catholic systems, have announced they will be cutting staff positions and charging parents for lunchroom supervision.

Love said inflation is also playing a role in added costs to school divisions.

Last Friday, upon return from a trade trip to New York and Washington, D.C., Moe said school divisions should not charge parents for lunchroom supervision and instead should draw money from reserves.

Moe said in general, reserves have been growing the past three or four years across the school divisions, adding that divisions have until June 30 to submit their budgets to Education Minister Dustin Duncan.

Meanwhile, Saskatchewan School Boards Association president Shawn Davidson said some but not all 27 school divisions saw reserves increase during the pandemic.

Davidson said some have had to use some of those funds in recent years due to the province’s “chronic underfunding of education.”

He said reserve money was often designated for specific one-time projects and can not be used to balance the books. 

In its response to the NDP’s request for additional funding, the Ministry of Education released a statement to newsmen on Friday, stating that some of the budgets indicate the staff and positions being removed are fewer than the number created with temporary pandemic funding.

The government said the funding bumps provided during the pandemic from both the province and Ottawa were intended for temporary positions and were never intended to be permanent.

It said the ministry is looking at how reductions would impact student-to-teacher ratios and other services from pre-pandemic levels.

The government said Friday that if funds are available through windfall resource revenue, “we will decide as a province what additional supports may be available.”

Nearly 20 students attending Oxford High School where four students were killed and seven others were injured in a mass shooting are suing the school district, alleging that their constitutional rights to safety and education were violated. A law firm is representing the students.

The lawsuit, which states that the students want to see changes to improve security, names the Oxford Community School District, its former superintendent, and other officials.

The lawsuit demands that the school district hire a third-party investigation of the actions and events leading up to the shooting.

It also states that the district needs to put an end to the practice of concealing and minimizing threats of violence.

While other lawsuits against the school district have sought financial damages, the students’ lawsuit does not.

It is asking for the school district to stop students from going to class if they pose a threat to themselves or others.

The alleged shooter, 16 years old Ethan Crumbley, was charged with terrorism and murder as a result of the shooting that took place on November 30 at Oxford High School.

On the morning of the shooting allegedly committed by Crumbley, his parents came to the school and were shown drawings that their son had made, showing a handgun and the following words: “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.”

According to authorities, the parents, James and Jennifer Crumbley, did not take him home after the meeting. They were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter and have pleaded not guilty.

Oakland County prosecutor Karen McDonald said that James Crumbley bought the weapon found at the scene of the shooting at a local firearms store on Black Friday.

Parents of the children in the lawsuit said that the Oxford School Board has declined a review of the incident and events leading up to it by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office.

Last month, the district said it is hiring a law firm and an independent investigations firm to conduct a review.

The grounds and halls of St. Mary’s Catholic School in Bird Island were alive over the weekend, as past and present students, staff and community members came together to celebrate the school’s 125th anniversary.

St. Mary’s principal Tracy Bertrand Sigurdson, said the weekend was the schools way of appreciating the community for their support.

The weekend of fun, which occurred alongside the city’s annual Island Days festivities, included the Bird Island Bullfrogs baseball game Friday night and a wide variety of activities at the school and fairgrounds on Saturday — including tours of the school, bouncy castles, food trucks and a concert by Strange Daze at the Renville County Fairgrounds.

The celebration concluded with a celebratory mass at the church and pancakes after on Sunday.

Throughout the day on Saturday, current and former students, families and staff of St. Mary’s School toured through the school building, remembering their own times within the walls of the institution that first opened its doors in 1897.

St. Mary’s Catholic School was founded in 1897, when the Sisters of St. Joseph came to Bird Island to run the brand-new school, which was to be part of St. Mary’s Church.

St. Mary’s offered K-12 education until 1972, when the last class of seniors graduated. Since 1973 the school has provided K-8 grade education. Each year, a graduation ceremony is held for the eighth-graders.

According to trivia from Father George Schmidt, the smallest high school graduating class was that of 1919, when there were only two. The largest number of graduating seniors was 36 in 1949, 1968 and 1969.

Other school history highlights shared by Schmidt included the champion girl’s basketball team of 1922 and Minnesota Governor Mark Dayton’s visit to the school as a thank-you to McKaia Ryberg in 2012.

St. Mary’s has lived in four different buildings over its 125 years of operation.

The present-day school, located right beside the church, was built in 1915 and was originally St. Mary’s High School.

Over the past few years, maintenance projects have been done to keep the 107-year-old building in good condition.

The roof was replaced in 2018, and upcoming projects include tuckpointing the brick exterior, new windows and an upgrade playground.

And the technology has continued to change with smart boards having replaced chalkboards and students now with tablets instead of paper and pencils.

Jasper County schools have been placed under special monitoring by the South Carolina Education Department after a periodic review of special education plans found the district was not following rules and regulations.

According to a letter from the Education Department to the school district superintendent, the monitoring started earlier this month.

Focused monitoring is below a declaration of a state of emergency which allows the state agency to take over a local school district.

According to state Education Department spokesman Ryan Brown, Jasper County has been asked to provide records from its special education programs over the past two years.

The state agency will use that information to create a plan to help the district correct it problems.

Brown said Jasper County has also had difficulties getting children to and from school on buses and the state agency is also checking those problems.

He added that students who miss out on services at school because of transportation problems should be given make up time for those services, but Jasper County has not provided it.

Brown told the newspaper, The Post and Courier, that nothing was being done to ensure that the instruction the students missed and the services they may require were being provided to them.

Jasper County schools has not respond to The Post and Courier.

The UK could face further strike chaos after unions representing teachers and NHS workers warned of potential action over pay.

The National Education Union (NEU), which is the biggest teaching union, has warned that it plans to ballot 450,000 of its members unless it receives a pay increase in line with inflation.

The union said strike action could take place in schools in England in autumn.

Joint general secretary of the NEU, Kevin Courtney, said the union will ballot its members unless the Government offers around the three per cent rise it touted earlier this year.

Millions of NHS workers are set to receive their annual pay offer soon and there are concerns that it will fall short of inflation, which is running at 9.2 per cent.

Unison, the biggest union representing NHS staff, has warned that the pay offer could lead to a mass exodus of staff combined with industrial action in hospitals.

Unison general secretary Christina McAnea added that the government has a simple choice, either it makes a sensible pay award, investing in staff and services and reducing delays for patients.

It comes as more than 40,000 members of RMT will stage 24-hour walkouts on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday in a dispute over proposed job losses and their demand for pay hikes that will keep pace with inflation.

Only one in five trains will run on the three strike days, but services will also be hugely disrupted during the rest of the week.

The Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps, has accused the biggest rail workers’ union of punishing millions of innocent people by pressing ahead with next week’s train strikes.

Examination boards have been criticised by a watchdog for oversights on GCSE and A-level papers where pupils were tested on topics they were told would not come up or sat papers with mistakes.

In England students were given extra detail because of the pandemic but an AQA A-level law and GCSE physics paper included topics not listed in advance information.

Watchdog Ofqual said such mistakes caused distress for pupils.

Another exam board, Edexcel, has also apologised for labelling Gabon as the Democratic Republic of Congo on a map of Africa, in its GCSE geography paper.

And Wales’ main exam board, WJEC, said sorry for excerpts from three Shakespeare plays being either partly or fully missing from their English language and literature paper.

On Friday, AQA apologised to A-level law students for the confusion and stress after questions on nuisance were included in their paper, despite there being no advance warning that the subject would be included in the exam.

The exam board has not yet announced how the question will be marked.

The head of Northern Ireland’s exams board, the Council for the Curriculum, Examinations and Assessment (CCEA), has resigned.

CCEA said Margaret Farragher would be taking up a new opportunity within the UK education sector later this year.

Farragher has been interim chief executive at the exams board since Justin Edwards left in April 2021.

She has had to lead CCEA through the first GCSE, AS and A-level summer exams to be held since 2019.

In a statement to NI media confirming Farragher’s resignation, CCEA did not specify if she would leave the organisation before GCSE, AS and A-level results are awarded in August.

Exams in 2020 and 2021 were cancelled due to the pandemic and schools calculated grades to be awarded to pupils instead.

CCEA was widely criticised in 2020 for the way A-levels were graded after exams were cancelled, causing a U-turn from the then Education Minister Peter Weir.

After many results had been lowered during standardisation by the exams board, Weir decided that grades calculated by schools would be used.

Farragher was the CCEA’s director of education during that period but stepped up to head the organisation after former chief Edwards’ departure.

GCSE, AS, A-level and BTEC exams are currently taking place in Northern Ireland.

For the first time, a reserve set of A-level exams will be held in late June and early July for pupils who miss an initial paper due to illness.

Due to disruption caused by the pandemic, parts of many subjects have been omitted from the exams and pupils will sit fewer papers.

Some schools have, however, previously voiced concern over what CCEA decided to cut from some courses.

A spokesperson for CCEA told local media that its governing council would be implementing arrangements to fill the chief executive position.

A north Belfast school has been crowned best secondary school at a UK education awards ceremony.

Hazelwood Integrated College took home the prize of secondary school of the year at the Tes School Awards.

The awards were held in person for the first time in three years in London over the weekend.

Máire Thompson, the college principal, said it was a “great recognition” for the school after a very challenging two years.

Hazelwood is a co-educational, integrated school with students from different cultural, religious and socio-economic backgrounds straddling the north Belfast peace line.

In 2020, it was the most oversubscribed school in the area, even ahead of grammar schools.

According to Judge Christine Gilbert, It is so unusual, with 58 per cent of students on free school meals and yet it’s more popular than local grammar schools, which says something about parents’ regard for the school.”

Gilbert said the school brings together social workers and youth workers to work with teachers and learning mentors which seems to be pushing the achievement up.

Chief judge of the Tes Schools Awards and editor of Tes magazine Jon Severs said the Tes Schools Awards are the Oscars of education, recognising and celebrating everything that is great about the schools and school staff.

OFSTED says a primary school requires improvement because pupils have not had the quality of education they deserve.

Copthorne CofE Junior School on Church Road, Crawley was previously rated as good before the Ofsted visit in March 2022.

The report by lead inspector Lea Hannam and Kirstine Boon says pupils are happy and safe and show great compassion and respect for each other.

While inspectors found that it was good for behaviour and attitudes, and personal development, it rated the school as requiring improvements for the quality of education, leadership and management.

They said children have not had the quality of education they deserve and there is much to do to ensure that pupils learn as well as they should.

The reports says that teachers know what to teach and when to teach it. However, sometimes, teachers do not teach the mathematics curriculum in the way that leaders expect. 

This happens in other subjects too, with teachers planning lessons that are enjoyable but are not tied closely to what pupils need to understand and remember. This slows pupils’ learning. 

The report says pupils with special educational needs and/or disabilities (SEND) get the support they need with their work. 

Leaders identify needs accurately and address these through carefully considered individual targets. 

However, the gaps in curriculum thinking and delivery hinder pupils with SEND from achieving as well as they could. 

Inspectors also found that school leaders have started to review the curriculum for some subjects, but the work is not finished.

Pupils now study a balanced curriculum and enjoy reading and listening to stories. 

The school makes sure that pupils learn about looking after their mental health, and supports them in their personal development. 

The report states: “A few staff voiced concerns about workload, as many changes are being made.

Nevertheless, staff appreciate the changes that leaders are making, with one member of staff calling them refreshing.

Since her arrival, the new headteacher, who joined in September 2021, has prioritised ensuring the school does all it can to keep pupils safe.

In its list of improvements, inspectors advised the school should ensure that the curriculum is developed as a matter of priority and that staff are well trained to teach it successfully.

Leaders, including subject leaders, need to make sure that they have identified the key knowledge pupils must retain and that teachers know how to check it has been learned. 

Teachers are advised to focus on children’s “knowledge gaps” from what they missed during lockdowns.

Inspectors say there is more to do to fine-tune adults understanding of peer-on-peer abuse.