Holy Spirit School Division hauls in hardware for communications

By Alejandra Pulido-Guzman - Lethbridge Herald on November 4, 2022.

Submitted photo Award Recipients Jill Tamura, Cassandra Paul, Anisha Gatner, and Shaun Lohues pose with Superintendent Ken Sampson.

LETHBRIDGE HERALDapulido@lethbridgeherald.com

The Holy Spirit Catholic School Division recently received the Award of Excellence during the 2022 BRAVO! Awards hosted by the Canadian Association of Communicators in Education (CACE).

“Different communications departments in education from across Canada submit projects for their evaluation. This year there was 33 projects submitted and Holy Spirit was among the top five,” said Anisha Gatner, the school division’s communications coordinator.

She said receiving the award of excellence is really impressive considering the HSCSD is such a small organization in comparison to a lot of the other organizations competing nationally like Ontario and Quebec where they have full communications departments.

“For us to be in that cream of the crop award of excellence stature is quite an honour, and to be able to have other communicators look at our work and say this is excellent, is beyond words,” said Gatner.

She said the project they have submitted was their transportation registration process, which they have been trying to improve over the last couple of years.

“We have been working with Lethbridge 51 (division) as well, and Southland Transportation and trying to sort of get something to work between all three bodies,” said Gatner.

She said unfortunately the way things had worked out in trying to get all of their systems to work together, HSCSD was the only one that was able to put out a registration process last year and again this year.

“Holy Spirit just sort of reviewed it again and went ‘well it’s getting late in the game so we’re going to try this again with these kinds of improvements using the tools that we have available to us’,” said Gatner.

She said the biggest improvement was a feedback loop, where they sent an email to parents in the division asking if their child would be using the bus, and based on the response they were able to build their routes more efficiently.

“Using that information, we were able to sort of put that back into our power school systems that we can send notifications to families, so if you’re riding the bus and Van Tighem W2 is going to be late, now we can send you a message specifically to your situation, rather than sending messages to everybody in the school division,” said Gatner.

She said she was able to attend the CACE conference and received the award on behalf of the division.

“Actually, I was part of a team of four others, and lots of support from our senior administration. We were a really small but mighty team, and just the feedback that we gave each other was an amazing collaborative experience,” said Gatner.

HSCSD superintendent Ken Sampson said you can never judge a book by its cover.

“When you think of large metropolitan school divisions that have many people within specific departments that do specific work, when you think of a small school division like Holy Spirit it just speaks to the collaborative nature of everything that we do,” said Sampson.

He said that when they take on any project or initiative, it is always built from the grassroots up and it takes an individual to have that spark that gets the conversation going, that initiates some tremendous work, some foresight and some vision to say ‘this is what we need to do to better provide a service to our families’.

“From that perspective we’re very grateful to Anisha and her insights, to be able to move in that direction and we’ve always said in southern Alberta there is always that collaborative sharing, that nature of just being able to have many hands make light work,” said Sampson.

He said that within their building they have many departments that work together under Gatner’s leadership and initiative, to be able to craft that project and to be able to move it forward in such a way that they only have even better expectations of what is to come.

“This is incredible work, is coming from a very small jurisdiction and so we’re very proud, we were through the roof happy,” said Sampson.

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