Thursday January 22 2015
The
Leader
▲ Eagles remain winless in 2015 23
▲ Walking for memories in Surrey 3
LEARNING CENTRE MOVING BACK TO NORTH SURREY?
▶ PROGRAM MAY RETURN TO LOCATION IT HAD TO VACATE IN 2008 SHEILA REYNOLDS
It appears the North Surrey Learning Centre may move back to the location it was forced to leave eight years ago. As reported in The Leader last week, the Surrey School District has been told the program – for high school students who wish to learn outside the mainstream school system – must vacate the building near 134 Street and 77 Avenue it currently calls home. The landlord is unwilling to extend or renew the lease and the learning centre will have to move at the end of this school year. School district staff have considered many options and have determined Surrey Community College has space to accommodate the 240 or so students who attend. The college, operated by the school district, is located in a building beside the District Education Centre (DEC) at 92 Avenue and 140 Street – the same locale the North Surrey Learning Centre had to vacate in 2008 while DEC was under construction. The decision to move the learning centre is not final and staff will consult with students, staff and the public before reporting back to the school board.On Jan. 15, trustees gave the go-ahead for that consultation to begin. An update is due back to the board sometime next month.
▶ ICE TIME Ice X-plosion, an intermediate team from the Lower Mainland Figure Skating Club, performs at the Pacific Ice Synchronized Skating Club’s annual Christmas Gala at the South Surrey Arena on Dec. 6. The event featured performances by 17 different synchronized skating teams. The Lower Mainland Figure Skating Club trains at the Surrey Sports and Leisure Centre in Fleetwood. BOAZ JOSEPH
SOLDIERS BLAST TREATMENT
▶ VETERANS AFFAIRS IN THE CROSSHAIRS AT SURREY FORUM ON PTSD BOAZ JOSEPH
Lew Cocker never drank alcohol before he went overseas. When he returned home from Bosnia in 1995 after a second posting with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, “I knew I wasn’t the same,” the veteran told an audience at a forum on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
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(PTSD) Saturday in Cloverdale. He had witnessed first-hand atrocities that gave him such nightmares that he couldn’t – and still can’t – get more than two or three hours of sleep each night. The dreams are usually the same: he’s being chased in an environment of rubble. Jolted wide awake, he rarely goes back to sleep. More than a decade since his wife left him, Cocker, 52, who lives alone in Roberts Creek on the Sunshine Coast, said that even though he has stopped drinking, he’ll never be normal. “Normal would be going to sleep for eight hours.”
He had contemplated suicide, too, before he got help starting in 2010. That’s not uncommon, said Dr. Greg Passey, a psychologist who works with PTSD patients in private practice and at the BC Operational Stress Injury Clinic in Vancouver. Speaking at the Surrey forum – hosted by the White Rock-based Equitas Society, formed in 2011 to help disabled soldiers – Passey said in his studies going back to the early 1990s, he has found that 46 per cent of those with PTSD will consider suicide, and 19 per cent will make the attempt. continued on page 5
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