Border Land School Division Superintendent, Krista CurryA delegation from Border Land School Division joined various other stakeholders in Winnipeg last week to talk literacy and numeracy in Manitoba.
    
The three-day Learning for Life Literacy and Numeracy Summit was hosted by Manitoba Education with the intention of kick-starting the development of a long-term, province-wide literacy and numeracy strategy.

"It's always great when the Province takes the lead on something and shows the direction that it wants us to go and supports us in that," said Krista Curry, Superintendent for Border Land School Division.

She was quick to add however that most school divisions across the province, including Border Land, already have such a strategy in place and are doing good work in the areas of literacy and numeracy.

"The bottom line for us is always supporting capacity and teachers and ensuring that if there's growth and learning that they can do, that as a Division we are doing that."

In fact, Curry said administrators have committed to further improving the focus on literacy and numeracy by weeding out some of the other initiatives that can quickly become distractions. 
    
Meantime, Curry explained the summit started with a historical reflection of the last thirty years in education and what's happened provincially - positive and negative.

She added that the next two days were filled with one hundred discussions on topics generated by the group. One of those centred on math curriculum.

"There's certainly a push from some faculty members in the mathematics departments at the universities to change the math curriculum in Manitoba, " said Curry, who noted that that discussion was filled varying opinions.

Additional discussions involved children-in-care, poverty and the different ages of curriculum in terms of early years, middle years and high school.

Curry highlighted some of the conversations that will continue to happen locally in Border Land.

"There were some discussions on Indigenous Education and curriculum and what can be done," she explained. "We have (also) been looking in our division about the number of minutes that schools are spending on numeracy and literacy and what's the minimum that we expect."

The Province of Manitoba has said it plans to release an initial long-term strategy by the end of March 2018.