DIRECTOR’S ANNUAL REPORT
Mental Health Our Catholic Faith continues to be at the centre of our efforts to support the social, emotional and spiritual lives of our students. We continue to implement resources and training from School Mental Health Ontario, including the Faith and Wellness Everyday Classroom Resource, for elementary teachers (K-8). Faith and Wellness was developed with the support of OECTA and informed by Catholic educators. We also support the use of SMHO’s Leading Mentally Healthy Schools by our administrators, which helps guide the response to mental health needs in our schools, design whole-school wellness strategies, and implement health promotion programming at the classroom and school levels. Supporting LGBTQ Student Inclusion Our Catholic school communities strive to be places of compassion, inclusion and social justice for LGBTQ+ students, staff and families. Both high schools continue to have and support active and growing Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) clubs. This past year, our senior elementary school students started organizing GSA clubs. This reflects a growing awareness and openness about diversity among our students at younger grade levels and growing acceptance, understanding and responsiveness at the staff level. In our K-6 schools, the board is supporting requests from staff for more awareness level training on behalf of gender diverse students, staff and families. The goal is to champion enquiry, social justice and human dignity for all through safe, accepting and life affirming learning environments.
INSPIRING
achievement
PROVIDING LEARNING AND WORKING S PA C E S T H A T E N H A N C E P R O D U C T I V I T Y
In our continued work with New Pedagogies for Deep Learning, we are striving to inspire and develop competencies which will engage and enrich student thinking and learning. We continued to work in Families of Schools to examine Pedagogical Practices, Learning Partnerships, Learning Environments, and meaningful ways to Leverage Digital while being in remote learning environments. We maintained an emphasis on working on the 6 Global Competencies, (Collaboration, Citizenship, Character, Creativity, Critical Thinking, Communication) which align with Learning Skills, Catholic Graduate Expectations, and the Anishnawbe Seven Grandfather Teachings. Unfortunately, while we were unable to maximize Learning Design Cycles last year in a systematic way during the COVID-19 pandemic and moderate Learning Designs we are continuing to grow capacity around collaborative learning cycles and using the Learning Design Template, backward design model as a method of best practice to meet the needs of all learners. Long Term Plans were developed for Literacy, Mathematics, Religious Education, Indigenous Education, FSL, Special Education, Deep Learning as a means to be intentional in moving forward to support educators to best meet the needs of our students.
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