Author: dpac_admin

DPAC Presents – Tamara Strijack


Rest in a Restless World: Helping a Child with Anxiety

Download the presentation here.

Tamara Strijack is the academic dean of the Neufeld Institute, where she develops and delivers courses and workshops supporting parents, teachers, and helping professionals around the world make sense of children through developmental science.

Tamara works as a registered clinical counsellor, parent consultant, and sessional instructor for several universities, where she lectures for both the faculties of education and counselling. She provides emotional health consulting for schools and advises on the development of new programs that foster the social and emotional growth of all students.

She is the co-author of Reclaiming our Students: Why children are more anxious, aggressive, and shut-down than ever and what we can do about it.

Tamara has two daughters and lives on the West Coast of Canada.

Remote Learning Transition Program

The Remote learning Transition Program (RLTP) that was set up for families at the beginning of this year. Families wanted to have a program that would allow them to stay attached to their home school as opposed to our longer-term, district level, Distance Learning program. The RLTP was designed to be short term and to help families transition to other learning options. 

As we come to a natural break in the school year and work to wind down the RLTP we are working hard to ensure that there are learning options for every family.  

Our Principals and Vice Principals are reaching out to families to gather information on which learning option they would like to choose (in class, blended, or DL), or if they feel that the current offerings do not suit their needs.  

We are looking to redesign the RLTP program into a long-term program that will be sustainable for the district and offer exceptional learning opportunities for students.  

We know that a majority of the families in this program want a Distance Learning type option and we want to ensure that the learning options we offer are personalized to needs of the students.  

We are still carefully monitoring what is happening around the province and are constantly assessing our programs and what they deliver to and looking at learning options that will best serve our communities.  

New Cowichan Secondary Announced

Rob Fleming the Minister of Education was at Cowichan Secondary School today, and backed by our strong community, to announce the full replacement of the 70-year-old school!

The new, seismically safe school will have capacity for 1,100 students, eliminating the need for portables. It will also include a new sports field and Neighbourhood Learning Centre, and will be built on the Cowichan Place property next to Vancouver Island University’s Cowichan campus. The new school is expected to be ready for students in September 2023.

For more information please go to the SD79 Facebook Page and CTV

Individual Education Plans: A Guide for Parents

Many parents are not sure what to expect at an Individual Education Plan (IEP) meeting. When they meet school staff on behalf of their child, they may feel vulnerable or even frightened. Often, they don’t know what to do and are not clear about their role in the process. In this guide, our focus is to help you understand how an IEP meeting works and how you and your child, working together with the school, can get the most out of this process for the benefit of your child. You know more about your child than anyone else. The school needs this information to tailor its teaching to your child’s way of learning. A good IEP brings together your knowledge about your child with the school’s knowledge about teaching. The IEP meeting will produce a plan of what the school will do to teach your child and help him/her succeed. Individual Education Plan Guide.

Source: BCCPAC/IEP