Border Land School Division (BLSD) trustees have hammered out a set of strategic goals to help direct their work for the rest of the term, which ends in October 2026.
    
Chairperson, Patty Wiebe, says they felt they needed to be more purposeful in evaluating their own work. 

"So, what we decided to do was set up some goals and strategies and indicators," she explained.

"I think you can very easily just get into well, we do the same thing all the time and you just make decisions and you just set budget and you keep going. But as a Board, we felt it was important to set some goals and to do some personal work for ourselves," added Wiebe. "We need to make sure that the Board is mission-focused and that we're engaging with our community."

In fact, those are two of the goals that have been laid out.

So, what does it mean to stay mission-focused?

"The missions that we like to bring up consistently when we're making decisions is that we do it with students in mind so that it's not about our own agendas or anything like that. It's about what's best for the kids in Border Lands School Division," explained Wiebe. 

It also means staying out of the operational weeds, she noted. 

"We hire good people to do the operational stuff. We give them their budgets and we monitor to make sure that they're managing their budgets, but we do not get into the weeds and state of the operational part. That's a process for some newer trustees. It's a little bit of a learning curve."

And what about appropriately engaging with the community?

"We've struggled with that over the years," said Wiebe. "We've had meetings and we've done different things, and we have a very poor attendance. So, we've looked at some different strategies in order to do that."

Last but not least, trustees have committed to engage in the work necessary to be a high functioning board. 

"Do we always collaborate? Do we listen to understand other trustees? Do we work with integrity? Are we mission orientated? All of those things we looked at," noted Wiebe. 

Now that trustees have worked hard to set these goals, the work begins on making they are fulfilling them. They'll get together at the end of their term in 2026 and re-evaluate. 

The hope, added Wiebe, is that these goals will be reassessed every four years following school board elections that could see new trustees come into the fold.