ADVOCACY

Below are samples of my advocacy. These statements are taken from the LRSD Public Board Meeting transcripts.

June 2, 2026

I have a few questions related to the five year capital infrastructure plans… 

We do know that air conditioning is part of the five year plan,  as is the development of the rural property that was purchased last fall.  There was a news article today in the paper, there was an open house last week.  Here are my questions:

If resources in the classroom are a priority, if the well-being of our staff and students are a priority, how does LRSD justify moving forward with the design and development of a transportation and land-based learning hub while LRSD staff and students are melting in their classrooms?  

Learning from the land field trips might take place in spaces like Birds Hill Park or Fort Whyte.  How much is LRSD spending on the professional services with Prairie Architects, HTFC, and Landmark Planning? And how many a/c projects might we complete with these finite resources? 

A five year plan to execute the outstanding air conditioning projects in our schools is unacceptable.  If there are resources to execute this multimillion-dollar project, there are resources for air conditioning. 

I would like the Board and the SLT to stay focused on needs vs wants. When the budget came out the taxpayer was asked for more this spring, and it was to address the deficit and also balance the budget.  So that was what this community was told. 

We have staff and students who may have to wait another five years to get air conditioning in their schools. So appreciate… when you see a proposal like this, you’ve already purchased the land, but there is now being money put towards professional services to run these open houses, to explore the design etc.  Just even those professional services might have funded yet one or two more air conditioning projects.  

I’m just asking the team to be aware of the optics. I believe there was also FTE cuts as part of this budget.   So what does that look like to community when we are now focusing our vision on this… it’s a nice project…I’m just saying…it’s aspirational.

November 4, 2025

My question is about the public question period itself…

I wish to address how community can participate in the agenda item the public question period…I’d like to acknowledge LRSD has a reputation for being a very progressive school division. It does a lot of things well, but I think it does fall short … in engaging participation in our public board meetings. This is my overall question: Does LRSD's protocol to register for the public board meetings unintentionally contradict the spirit of the Public Schools Act? 

Allow me to elaborate. The LRSD website states, "The board of trustees values public participation in board meetings” yet LRSD experiences very few in-person attendees and most often little to no questions from online attendees. Why is that? Because there are some barriers to registering and attending the public meeting.

Here is a quote from Trustee Bjornson's campaign in the Winnipeg Sun October 1. “The most important role of a trustee is to listen.”  So then my question is: how can we give community an opportunity to be heard and our trustees an opportunity to listen?  By opening up the meetings. 

The Public Schools Act states “every school board shall hold its meetings openly and no person shall be excluded or removed from any meeting except for improper conduct”. There is no suggestion in the Public Schools Act that board meeting participants must reside in LRSD. The directive is simply that every school board shall hold its meetings openly. 

So these are my recommendations:  I recommend the requirement to attend the board office or a school to provide ID to prove you reside in LRSD be eliminated. I recommend only name and email address be required to register for a meeting.

If this board is sincere about valuing public participation in board meetings, I recommend it's time we remove some of these barriers.