Project will reduce after-hours emails, texts

In an effort to give teachers, administrators and parents more personal time, the Chinook’s Edge School Division is undertaking an after-hours email and text reduction initiative, says division superintendent Kurt Sacher.

In a Gazette interview, Sacher explained that the Weekdays Til 6 project will see non-emergency electronic traffic “significantly reduced” during evening hours.

It is believed to be one of the first school projects of its kind, he said.

“With all of the demands with cellphones and technology, we wondered what would happen if we put protective hands around family time and gave a little space; if we tried to have non-emergency emails and text messages not occurring after 6 p.m,” he said.

“For us in a leadership role, we won’t send a note out to a teacher or administrator saying, ‘please take care of this or please do this.' We won’t do that after 6 p.m.; we will wait until the following morning to send it out.”

The initiative came about following extensive study, he said.

“If you look at it and study it, and we have done a lot of research on it, you find that people are actually losing sleep and they are losing energy that they need for the kids and schools the next day,” he said.

The division launched the initiative on a limited scale in May and June “and we were very pleased with the results and what it is doing for us internally as a division. We are still able to get the work done after 6, but they don’t have this intense, constant, in-your-face mechanism.

“The research is getting more and more clear that we need to put protective hands around our people and protect them from that never-ending exposure to data and technology.”

While the project has initially focused on teachers and administrators, there are plans to include parents as well starting this fall, he said.

“When we look at parents we worry for them too in the sense that they don’t really need a text message or group email at 9 o’clock at night.

“We are saying to parents that we are not going to send stuff out that is a non-emergency on an email or a text after 6 o’clock at night, and we ask them to do the same to help our people have the family time and respite that they need.

“We are doing it to support our staff and we are also doing it to support our parents.”

There will still be phone calls after 6 o’clock, he noted.

“A phone call is different than an email or a text that can be bumped to three or four people,” he said. “We think we can focus through the normal business hours the bulk of our non-emergency work.”

Messaging about the initiative is being made through the division’s website and newsletters, he said.

The Innisfail-headquartered CESD has 40 schools in West Central Alberta.

Meanwhile, with the new school year getting underway, the division will be continuing to focus on four principal goals in 2018-19, he explained.

“Coming off late last year we had a really positive accountability pillar where our high school completion rates were up significantly and our student achievement was up significantly,” he said.

“That has given us an enthusiasm to continue the work with the four goals that we have been sticking to for a few years now.”

The first goal focuses on literacy, the second on academic achievement and excellence, the third on career transition, and the fourth on social-emotional learning, he said.

Regarding the fourth goal, he said, “We are providing teachers with a framework for how to deal and respond with some of the changing students that they are dealing with.

“They are seeing more and more complex students. They are dealing with anxiety more than we’ve seen before and other self-regulating issues where they are having more of a struggle regulating their own individual behaviour. So teachers need tools and supports.”

Staff wellness representatives are now in place in every CESD school, he said.