As the 2024–2025 school year winds down, the Garden Valley School Division (GVSD) is recognizing the important role parents and community members continue to play in student life and extending an open invitation for more people to get involved next year.
Superintendent Dan Ward says the division has long relied on volunteers to help deliver extracurricular programming.
“That's been kind of a long-standing practice of the school division in terms of relying on parents and volunteers, and community members to help us with extracurriculars. Many of our coaches are, in fact, community coaches.”
As the division plans for next fall, he says now is a great time to reach out.
“This would be a great opportunity,” he said, “if there are parents or even community members that have a skill set in something that our students would be interested in doing, to reach out to our schools or even the Division office and we would get them in touch,” he said.
How the program works
Volunteers fall under GVSD’s official Volunteers in Schools Program, which includes some basic safety screening, such as a criminal record check, along with a child abuse registry check that Ward says the division can help with.
He also shared that, for the program, the onus of supervising the students does not fall on community members.
“Generally speaking, we attach the parent to a teacher in terms of not having the parent responsible for supervising students on their own, so we definitely would support the parent or Community member.”
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Volleyball to the chess club
Volunteer coaches and leaders can be found across the division, leading many different programs, and Ward shared a few examples to get people’s creativity going.
“Probably the ones that are the best known would be our major Manitoba High School Athletic Association programs like basketball and volleyball,” said Ward. “A good number of our teams, the head coach is a community member or a parent.”
But it’s not just about sports. The division also welcomes community members who want to offer clubs or activities based on their unique interests or talents.
“If we had a parent or community member who was very interested and coaching something like chess or facilitating a chess club... it would definitely fall under our Volunteers in Schools Program.”
Ward shared that the division relies on parents and community members for their athletic programming and many other extracurriculars, and encouraged any parents interested in getting involved to reach out over the summer.
Anyone interested in volunteering can contact their local school or reach out directly to the GVSD office to learn more.