Betty Bekkering is looking to keep her seat as a School District 57 Trustee.
Bekkering is finishing her eighth year as a trustee.
“I knew that the last couple of years had been quite a challenge, I really liked where we were by June, just prior to the closure for summer break this year,” she said.
“We just had done so much work on the first year of our strategic plan, and we had just adopted all of the policies and admin procedures that we’ve been working on to try and delineate what was governance and what was operational.”
Bekkering said she felt she needed to run again to see these come to fruition.
“I really love this insurgence of Indigenous Education, I just see it as the right thing to do for our school district,” Bekkering said.
“We’ve heard so many of the truths, that now is the time for reconciliation, and I feel that our Indigenous education is really providing that reconciliation. It’s giving our students a chance to know their identity, I see them having a real sense of pride in their heritage, and for the non-Indigenous kids, I see they’re gaining an understanding of what historically happened to Indigenous people.”
Bekkering added the district has 3,500 students who have self-identified as Indigenous.
“I see teacher shortages and recruitment and retention is a big issue, but it’s an issue right across the country, and we’re in competition for those teachers everywhere,” she said.
“I think what we need to do is collaborate with all levels of government to come up with a plan of how we’re going to increase the number of young adults who want to go into teaching.”
Bekkering said increasing the salaries of teachers would help attract more people to the profession.
“I think that the amount of dollars coming from the government coming from the government needs to increase so that we can actually have better programming for the special needs students,” she said.
“If we’re going to be inclusive, and have everyone gaining education to the best of their abilities, we need to make sure we have all of the resources we need for that.”
Bekkering added more needs to be done to accommodate the growing number of students within the district.
The School District Elections, along with the Municipal Election, will take place on Saturday, October 15th.