The board of education of Chinook's Edge School Division denied three separate school trip requests at the organization's monthly meeting last Wednesday.Considerable discussion took place with regard to a trip to Disneyland in California by a group of Grade 12 students at River Glen School in Red Deer. The school had planned the trip for the period between the conclusion of first semester exams in January and the start of the second semester in early February.“It wasn't tied to curriculum and their timelines (were too short). There's (also) a requirement for a six-month request time for out-of-country trips and they're asking for this trip to go at the end of January or early February. We'd like to see a little bit more of a curricular tie for trips like that,” said Colleen Butler, chair of the board.Butler said any out-of-country trips need to enhance students' understanding of, or exposure to, the particular area they are visiting, and the board felt that in this case, this trip didn't meet that criterion.A second trip request, also from River Glen, was to Greece and Italy in the spring. The board felt uncomfortable in approving a trip request to an area, in this case Greece, in which the Canadian government has issued a travel advisory against going to that region because of recent instability there.“There was discussion in the travel advisory that there could be difficulties getting to the airport or ports. There's been a lot of unrest in Greece. We're concerned about safety and so we can't approve a trip where we're putting kids at any (additional) degree of risk,” Butler said.A trip being planned by Olds Koinonia Christian School students to Mexico this spring was also denied because of a travel advisory issued by the Canadian government.“The travel advisory says to avoid all non-essential travel. This is not essential so we cannot approve that because … we can't take that risk. It puts the board in risk of liability as well,” she said.Enrolment numbers up from projectionsFinal enrolment numbers are in and the CESD is up 104 students from projections that were made in the spring of last school year. The division had budgeted for 10,677 students and the total actually was 10,781. Total enrolment is down 30 students from this time last year.“Overall, we were quite pleased. The good news is when you're up (from) projections, you get a little more funding for the needs that are out there in our schools. We had resourced our schools based on a projection that we thought was pretty close … but we ended up with a few more students than projected, so that's always a better picture than the other way around,” said Kurt Sacher, superintendent of schools.Chinook's Edge receives base funding of $7,995.59 per student for grades 1 to 3 and $6,561.68 per student for grades 4 through 12.
"We're concerned about safety and so we can't approve a trip where we're putting kids at any (additional) degree of risk."Colleen Butler, chair, CESD
