Superintendent's Message - June 2011

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…”(Lamentations 3:22-23)

Message from Father Mike Mireau

As we bring another year to a close, and those ‘thoughts of summer adventures’ start becoming focused, we have an opportunity to reflect upon the past year, revisit our goals, and look to some time away from the frantic pace to bring a much bigger context to the ten months that have passed.

Reductions in government funding in certain areas such as AISI (Alberta Initiative for School Improvement), class size funding, and English Language Learning Enhancement Grant have certainly resulted in huge challenges for personnel, programming for all students and maintaining the support that was made possible by the funding.  In June, District administration and the Board of Trustees will be preparing the final budget document to be submitted to Alberta Education.

To those students and their families who are graduating from the District, ‘Congratulations…we bid you a fond farewell and wish you many blessings and successes in the future’.

The May 2011 Accountability Pillar Report, our District’s ‘report card’ from Alberta Education, held some wonderful news - our District has made significant gains in the area of high school completion rates.  Through AISI funding, Edmonton Catholic Schools has made high school completion a priority during the past few years. Programming, specific strategies and interventions have been implemented by District staff to better support our students.  The success of this initiative is shown in the excellent gains that have been made.

Our improvement rating for high school completion rate is Improved Significantly; it is the second consecutive year we have improved significantly on this measure.  The current 3 Year High School Completion Rate is 76.5%, an improvement of 2.7% over the previous year.  In two years our 3 Year High School Completion Rate has improved 5.5%.

This year’s District Satisfaction Survey results showed that all of the themes had satisfaction rates higher than 80%.  This is the first year that all parents were able to participate in the survey as well as all students in grades 4-12, and therefore this year’s survey will establish the baseline for future ones.

Overall Satisfaction Survey Questions for 2010/2011 include:

• Grades 4 to 6 students – Overall happy with their school (96.0%)
• Grades 7 to 9 students – Overall satisfied with the quality of education received (90.2%)
• Grades 10 to 12 students – Overall satisfied with the quality of education received (90.5%)
• Parents – Overall satisfied with the quality of education their child received (93.2%)
• Staff – Overall satisfied that the District is a good place to work (97.4%)
• Staff – Overall satisfied that their school/department is a good place to work (95.0%)

The strong satisfaction rates expressed by all three groups (students, staff and parents) in the areas of Catholicity, safety and overall school learning environment attest to the great work of staff members.  Thank you to all staff for their dedication and commitment in serving our students and their families, and working in such close collaboration with colleagues, parish communities and the greater community to deliver opportunities for an excellent Catholic education.

The complete reports can be found at http://www.ecsd.net/annual_reports/about.html  

Thank you to all parents/guardians for your support of your children’s learning throughout this past year.  Thank you to our District Chaplain, Father Mike Mireau, for his leadership and guidance this year, and for always reminding us that God’s love for us is unwavering…‘steadfast’ as the quote above from Lamentations states.

May God’s blessings be upon you and your families as you pursue those summer activities you most enjoy!

Sincerely,

Joan Carr
Superintendent