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Board hopes retreat helps heal wounds
By RICK CONRAD
Education Reporter
Almost every member of the
Halifax regional school board has signed up for a retreat
designed to help them get along with each other, says chairman
Gary O’Hara.
The board has budgeted about
$25,000 for the Jan. 18-20 sessions for senior staff and 13
elected representatives, Mr. O’Hara said. The previous board
went on its own retreat.
The new sessions will involve workshops on team-building and
trust for board members, he said, adding that so far, 11 or 12
members have confirmed they’re going.
"Today’s perhaps not a great day to ask everybody, but I think
if somebody’s having reservations today, I think that will
change," Mr. O’Hara said, referring to a confrontation between
board members before Wednesday night’s meeting.
The sessions will be held at
Ledgehill, a corporate learning centre in Lawrencetown,
Annapolis County, which bills itself on its website as a
"sanctuary … connecting people and their teams to new ways to
communicate; bringing themselves and their corporate teams to
new levels of awareness."
Dartmouth Centre-Albro Lake board member Gin Yee says the
sessions are vital.
"We haven’t been communicating back and forth, we always make
these assumptions," Mr. Yee said.
"So I’m hoping at the retreat that we can just drop the
assumptions and ask personally one on one back and forth what’s
going on."
He said he hopes every board member attends the sessions.
"If five, four, six people went, we need to start somewhere.
Yes, it would be perfect if we could get every board member
there, but it looks like it won’t happen that way. We just need
to start somewhere."
(rconrad@herald.ca)
Source: The Herald, December, 2006
http://www.herald.ca
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