When students return to Turtleford Community School this September, they’ll find a brand-new specialized support classroom – the first for the Northwest School Division.
The division oversees 22 schools across the region. The school, which serves about 300 students from pre-kindergarten through Grade 12 in Turtleford, was chosen as the launch site after administrators reviewed data and consulted with parents and staff.
Director of education Jennifer Williamson said the pilot is designed to provide short-term, targeted instruction that helps students build self-regulation skills before they return to their regular classrooms.
“Ideally, that will reduce the classroom disruptions, which would allow more consistent learning time for all of our students,” she said.
The classroom will include a full-time teacher and an educational assistant, supported by an occupational therapist, counsellor and speech-language pathologist. Williamson said the program is built around five guiding principles: student-centred learning, safety, parental involvement, inclusion and flexibility.
“This is the first year we’ve had a specialized classroom, so we’re going to be learning as we’re going, but it really is around those principles,” she said.
“We’ll continue to tweak and be flexible to make sure that the program is meeting the needs of the students and that teachers are also learning various skills and building capacity to deal with the complex behaviors that we’re seeing.”
The initiative is part of a province-wide rollout. Northwest staff attended a June session to hear from other school divisions already running pilot classrooms.
One of the things that we took away… is that whole idea of using, for example, a self-regulation program across the entire school,” Williamson said. Instead of each teacher using a different program, the goal is for everyone to follow the same approach so students can build on those skills more easily over time.
One of the early pilot schools, St. Mary School in North Battleford, has already reported success.
Vice-principal Jennifer Gentes described a breakthrough moment when a student facing emotional dysregulation used the new “Connection” classroom to calm down — and returned to class without disruption.
St. Mary’s program, launched in January 2024, employs two full-time teachers and an educational assistant alongside a school-wide intervention strategy. So far it has seen 25 per cent fewer classroom disruptions and a 12.5 per cent improvement in student self-regulation and engagement.
Then-Minister of Education Jeremy Cockrill praised St. Mary’s accomplishments.
“When I’m down in Regina, [and] I visited most of them in the province. These guys have the best one here,” he said during a Battlefords Chamber of Commerce luncheon earlier this year.
Williamson said Turtleford was selected not only because of the data and community input, but also because rural schools often lack the same support available in larger centres.
“We have many rural schools in our division and not all of our rural communities have all the support available to them,” she said. “So that was also part of the reason that we did choose Turtleford.”
Although all schools in the division could use more support, the decision ultimately came down to team discussions and what schools were seeing.
With the classroom set to open in about a week, Williamson said the year ahead will focus on adapting the program to match student needs before expanding it elsewhere.
“What are the programs that are going to be offered? What are the skills that are going to be focused on? It’s all going to depend on what the student’s needs are,” she said. “That’s going to be one of our key focuses this year.”
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Kenneth.Cheung@pattisonmedia.com
