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5 K-12 Transitions and Supports
Speakers: Scott Beddall, Ministry of Education and Sam Jingfors, Safer Schools Together
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Video Transcript
Jennifer Jordan: I’d like to welcome back [Carrie 00:00:06] from the Ministry of Advanced Education Skills and Training to give us a little bit of context for our next session. Thank you.
Carrie Dusterhoft: Hi, everyone. Just a really quick context piece for the K to 12 agenda item that we have coming up. One of the themes that came up frequently in our outreach campaign feedback was the need for the K to 12 and PSI sectors to work more closely together to insure better transitions for students. So, through some initial discussions with Scott, who you’ll be hearing from shortly, it became apparent to us that there were a lot of things going on in the K to 12 sector that aligned with areas of interest on the post-secondary side.
Carrie Dusterhoft: So, we think there may be some good opportunities to build on the work in the K to 12 sector, to partner or to leverage resources, but we thought it was important to have that discussion at the forum to help guide us in terms of where we might focus our efforts. So, I would be very interested to hear if something sparks from this discussion that Scott and Sam will have today, and if so, please add any thoughts that come up on the graffiti walls. So with that, I’d like to introduce Scott Beddall from the Ministry of Education, and Sam Jingfors from Safer Schools Together.
Scott Beddall: Okay. So, hi everyone. My name’s Scott Beddall. I’m the Director of Wellness and Safety with Ministry of Education, and I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. I’m going to talk a little bit about the overall sort of context and background about what we’re doing in K to 12 around the students’ safety, and then I’m going to pass it over to my colleague, Sam, who’s going to dive into some of the services and supports that they provide to our schools.
Scott Beddall: So, to start things off, I’ve been working in healthy schools for over 12 years now with Ministries of Heath and Education at different times. Thanks, Sam. One of the things that’s been really great to see over the last little while is an increased recognition of the importance of student wellness and safety in their broader approach to learning in K to 12. It felt like for a while it was kind of like, “Hey, we’re over here. We’ve over here. We’re trying to do some good stuff.” Now it’s built into our Ministry’s policy for student success as healthy and effective learning environments, really on sort of the idea that students need to feel safe, they need to fell well, in order to learn effectively.
Scott Beddall: Then a lot of our actual work around student safety in K to 12 has been under our erase strategy, which stands for expect, respect, and a safe education. Erase started back in 2012, and it really was in response to some high profile and largely incidents where bullying was quite at the center