Community schools are where it's at...

This ramble was published in the Midland Mirror.

At some point in time schools closed their doors to the community and made it very difficult for people to enter. Supervising field trips require criminal reference checks and your first-born. A change in times required some changes in policy to ensure student safety. With all that worked out now, schools are realizing how important the community is to education. Schools reflect their community in many ways. With this understanding we have re-opened our doors and actively seek community participation in education. Over the past few months PSS has been lucky to have many community members in our building providing education beyond the expertise of a teacher. Lisa Garratt with the Georgian Manor/County of Simcoe taught our health care class about wound care. Beth Hamer, Deborah Duncan and Christine Zurawski with the Penetanguishene Mental Health Centre are working to help us offer Suicide Awareness and other programs and Kelly Hubbard with the Infection Control Network helped us create infection control modules. These are just a few of the community members who have made PSS a better place. We’ve had holocaust survivors speak to our entire student body, community members speak to our environmental and outdoor education programs about conservation and site 41 and all this is in addition to the too-numerous-to-name local businesses that take on co-op students. The Town of Penetanguishene recently came in to speak at a staff meeting to teachers about all the possibilities for partnerships. This is a very exciting era bringing communities and schools together for the benefit of students. We at PSS would like to send out a big heartfelt THANK YOU to those community members who find the time from their busy days to come in and help us make education a priority. PSS would not be the great school it is without all of our support.