Three youth sporting bodies updated their COVID-19 protocols this week and made three very different decisions.
The Victoria-Brock Baseball Association cancelled their 2020 summer season, Ontario Soccer extended its prohibition on play until July 1, and Ontario Rugby has started to make noises about a return to play protocol.
Beginning Sept. 8, Fleming College in Lindsay and Peterborough will start its fall semester using online and alternative delivery methods.
The college hopes that through the implementation of its Fleming Safe plan the school will be able to ensure that students can complete their programs while maintaining the highest possible safety standards in compliance with all government and public health directives.
A Lindsay landlord who rents regularly to Fleming students and who didn’t want to be identified was contacted for background on the story. He is concerned since he is normally fully rented for the fall by now.
In its first year in existence the Kawartha Lakes Concert Band performed two concerts. The first happened just three months after it formed; the second was for a sold-out audience at the Academy Theatre. “When the band participated in the Peterborough Kiwanis Music Festival, it earned a mark of 93 per cent and went on to win top prize for community bands in province-wide competition. So, as the band prepares for “To All a Good Night,” the Dec. 14 concert that will kick off its second year, the question is, what’s responsible for this success?
Some good fortune for sure: Who knew 74 musicians would answer a call to join, or that there’d be such a good balance of brass, woodwind, and percussion players? (Show me another community band that has 14 clarinets — a core component, clarinets are the violins of a concert band — and two bass clarinets, or three tubas and six trombones).
Thanks to organizing efforts by 17-year old Abby Jardine, Fenelon Falls joined other parts of Canada and much of the world in a climate strike September 27.
Rallying at the old Fenelon Falls Theatre marquee sign, about 50 marchers took to Fenelon Falls’ main street to bring attention to the issue of climate change.
It’s September, and Mallory Cramp-Waldinsperger is back at Carleton University for her third year in Journalism. Adam Folland is back at school too, starting second year in Fleming College’s Fish & Wildlife program and carving out time for duties as Frost Student Association Vice President.
It might seem odd to tie them together in the same column. One grew up here and is studying elsewhere; the other grew up in Guelph and is studying here. One grew up listening to CBC radio and exploring ideas with classmates in IB English and Theory of Knowledge courses at I.E. Weldon; the other became obsessed with wolves at age five and grew up camping and exploring the outdoors.
In the mid 1990s, while working at a newspaper as a young scribe, I wrote what I thought was a great story about a teacher who was taking a sabbatical. He was going to visit an overseas country and increase his learning and experience. He would inevitably accumulate new wisdom to bring back to future students one day.
Except that particular story never ran. I was told to get the ‘real’ story. How much was this going to cost? What sort of burden would this be to ‘taxpayers?’ The headline was altered, the focus shifted. In the end, the teacher and board of education were meant to feel shame for allowing such a thing to happen. I was embarrassed to see my name on that byline.
The family doctor shortage in Kawartha Lakes, and the rest of the country, might not be so bad today if the previous provincial Liberal government had done things differently in 2015.
In Ontario, after a medical student graduates, they don’t immediately start a practice. First, they must complete a residency where they train with established physicians for at least two years and up to four years depending on the discipline.
The heads of the elementary and secondary schools’ teachers’ unions are calling on Director of Education, Larry Hope, to set the record straight – that teachers did not coerce students to walk out on April 4.
Just a few days ago more than 100,000 students walked out of more than 700 Ontario schools to protest the PC government’s agenda, including changes to the health curriculum, deep cuts to OSAP, and the recently proposed changes to class sizes and e-learning. These were student organized and student-led protests.
But on the evening of April 4, Minister of Education Lisa Thompson, on the official ministry website, dismissed the activism of the student organizers “and attempted to spin a false narrative about the role of teachers and teachers’ unions,” according to the open letter from the union reps.
When you consider the word ‘literacy,’ you mostly likely think about reading, but did you know that literacy encompasses so much more than that? There is digital literacy, financial literacy, community literacy…and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Schools are designed to teach students all sorts of literacy as they progress through the grades – preparing children for the ‘real world.’
Can you think of another institution that has similar goals? If you guessed the local library, then you are absolutely correct.
By now, most of us with school-aged children have settled into the routines of fall and the new school year. Of course, this means getting up early, packing lunches, driving here and there in our very busy lives and of course hearing about the school day at the dinner table.
If your kids are anything like mine, you likely hear stories about what their friends did that day, who the favourite teachers are and how they’ve done on their assignments. Of course, we always hope the stories are positive and that your child’s experience at school is a good one.
