The weather turned out to be nearly perfect – everyone got plenty of Vitamin D – for the San Clara/Boggy Creek Métis Local’s annual Langan Lake fishing derby held March 9.

The event drew about 150 anglers

Find out who won the top prize in this week’s issue.

Members of the Roblin Skating Club took to the ice at the Centennial Arena Sunday, March 10 to present their season-ending showcase “Under The Sea”.

The show featured a guest performance by Blades Unlimited, a regional synchro team.

Check out some action shots in this week’s Review.

Prairie Mountain Health is taking additional steps to encourage community members to protect their kidneys.

March is kidney awareness month, and PMH encourages everyone to learn more about protecting their ‘beans.’

Check out this week’s issue for some timely information

Last week the world celebrated International Women’s Day on March 8, which is a time to celebrate, acknowledge and showcase the remarkable contributions, efforts and achievements of women. Two women in the tri-community are stepping up to a higher level of community service by being a part of The Pas Fire Department (TPFD).
Brooklyn Mayer is the newest female recruit to join TPFD and has found her place as one of the members.
“What first made me join, was seeing the advertisements for a calling to TPFD in the local newspaper,” said Brooklyn Mayer. “I joined last year in 2023.
“Since I started, there was only one other woman in the department.”

The Northern Manitoba Skills Competition always brings out the best of the best when it comes to high school students demonstrating a certain skill set. Once again, the hairstyling portion of the competition was held in The Pas and showcased many talented students taking hairdressing at Mary Duncan School
“I taught hairstyling part-time between 2017 and 2023, while I went to school to complete my education degree,” said Mary Duncan School Hairstyling Instructor Becki Crozier. “I graduated this past June and am now teaching hairstyling full time at Mary Duncan School.

Cree Nation Tribal Health (CNTH) is presenting their first gathering, known as Weesahkayjak Comes Home, for Indigenous 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals in the tri-community. The event will be held for two days at The Pas Legion.
“This is our first time hosting the event,” said Connie Merasty. “I’m the 2SLGBTQIA+ Program Manager at Cree Nation Tribal Health and this position came up last year, so it’s fairly new. With the funding we were allotted, I decided to try and hold a gathering for 2SLGBTQIA+ people in the north. From that concept, we had an opportunity to host a small gathering here in The Pas.

The Pas Guest List has contracted an artist, this time from northern Manitoba, to do the second mural as part of their Walking Path Mural Project, which brings new life and art to the community. There were no specifications given to the artist on what to paint for this second mural, so it was like a blank canvass waiting to be brought to life.
“For the second mural it was really important to feature a local northern Manitoban Artist,” said The Pas Guest List Treasurer and Co-founder Gabrielle Swan. “Mike Spencer is so active in the arts community and his style is unlike anything we have in the other murals in The Pas; it was an obvious choice for us to commission him to create the second mural.

Winter almost came and went without Swan River sculptor Derryl May crafting another creation in his front yard, with last week’s precipitation providing a medium to erect a representation of an osprey catching a fish, which melted down somewhat and re-envisioned into a chickadee. Here, the final result before the above-freezing temperatures melted it further.

After suffering three losses last week, the Dauphin Kings have resigned themselves to a third-place finish in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s MGEU West Division.

Dauphin’s week began with a 4-0 setback at the hands of the first-place Virden Oil Capitals, Tuesday in Virden, followed by a 3-2 overtime loss to the Neepawa Titans, a game in which the Kings led 2-1 until Neepawa tied it with 14 seconds left in regulation, then won it on a power play with two seconds left in overtime.

Saturday, the Kings hoped to make up some ground when they hosted the Blizzard Jr. A Hockey Club, but they were set back on their heels almost right off the start in what turned into a 5-3 Blizzard victory, the team’s 12th win in a row.

Defenceman Aiden Murray was assessed a high sticking penalty 53 seconds into the game and 37 seconds later, defenceman Trey Gnetz was given what was initially called an interference penalty, but was later changed to a cross checking penalty, putting the Kings two men short.

The Blizzard took advantage, scoring twice to build an early 2-0 lead, 3:21 into the contest and they never looked back, building a 5-1 lead less than six minutes into the third period.

The Kings scored two goals 34 seconds apart, but that was as close as they would get.

As a result, the Kings enter the final week of the season with a 34-17-2-1 record for 71 points, seven behind the Blizzard.

Kings head coach and general manager Doug Hedley felt the second penalty was unwarranted as it was a play which occurs several times a game.

“We do it all year. Everybody does it. Every PK unit does it. The guy has the puck, he dumps it in, he gets hit. And all of a sudden we’re down five-on-three. I didn’t agree with the call. It is what it is. It was a tough start,” he said.

Hedley felt the Kings were better the rest of the period, but gave up a goal just 1:13 into the second period to fall behind 3-1.

“And then, for some reason, the start of every period, we’re back on our heels,” he said.

To the Kings credit, they didn’t give up and scored twice to make a game of it.

“We wanted to send a message that they have to go through us. If you have a bad shift, it’s the guys on the bench that are responsible for having a better shift. They’ve got to get out and work with five guys on the ice,” Hedley said.

The Kings started throwing pucks at the net and creating opportunities, but failed to close the gap.

Now the Kings will end the season with four games this week, beginning with the final home game of the season, tonight, against the Portage Terriers at 7:30 p.m.

On Wednesday, the Kings travel north for a rematch with the Blizzard at 7:30 p.m.

On Friday, Dauphin is in Winnipeg to face the Blues, before ending the season in Selkirk against the Steelers on Saturday.

Hedley plans to give some players some rest to make sure everyone is healthy and ready to go for the playoffs.

Ratepayers living within the boundaries of Mountain View School Division (MVSD) are preparing for an increase in the education portion of their property taxes.

At the division’s 2024-25 Public Budget Forum, Mar. 7, secretary-treasurer Lori Slepicka indicated the mill rate for the special levy will rise to 13.87 in the coming school year, an increase of one mill from the previous year.

While the effect the increase will have on individual ratepayers will depend on changes in assessment of their property over the past year, it will mean and additional $45.02 per $100,000 value on residential property, $26.01 on farm land and $65.03 on commercial property. The effect on farm property and residential properties will be mitigated by provincial rebates.

“The province is still promising a rebate of 50 per cent for residential and farmland, so that would be an increase of $13 for residential. On farmland the effect would be about $22.51 after the rebate,” Slepicka said.

The increase will raise an additional $2.98 million dollars for the 2024-25 budget, Slepicka said.

The additional funds will be used to increase educational assistant hours, while maintaining all other staffing levels, support informational technology infrastructure upgrades, increase the budgets for maintenance supplies and services and cover anticipated contractual obligations for both educators and non instructional staff.

“The contractual obligations are difficult to predict right now. Teachers’ bargaining is being done at a provincial level, so we have no idea what those salaries are going to come in at and the contract has been expired for a couple years already. And then our non-teaching union is also expired, so we don’t know exactly what that’s going to be for next year either,” Slepicka said. “So we’re putting what we think is a fair and reasonable amount into the budget to be fiscally responsible so that we have money to cover the salaries when we get the settlements of the contracts.”

The hope is the province will come through with extra funding to cover the added costs of the contract it negotiates with teachers, but even if it does not, the division will have to raise all the funds required for retroactive pay this year, she added.

“Our hope is that we won’t be, but (the province) are not yet indicating that they will cover those expenses,” Slepicka said, adding some provisions have been made in past years to help mitigate the effects of the new contracts. “We budget a little bit each year, so we just keep adding to it as we go along.”

Overall, MVSD’s balanced budget proposal calls for $50,816,934 each of revenue and income, up 8.1 per cent for last year.

On the revenue side, provincial grants are budgetted at $30,093,626, while municipalities will be on the hook for $18,449,048. First Nations revenue has been budgetted at $1,023,225, income from private organizations at $532,900, school division revenue at $478,420, federal revenue at $19,715 and income from other sources at $220,000.

At 57.08 per cent, the majority of expenditures come in the area of regular instruction, with student support services accounting for an additional 14.36 per cent. Maintenance comes in as the next highest budget line at 12.19 per cent of total expenditures followed by transportation at 7.12 per cent, instructional support at 3.65 per cent and administration at 3.11 per cent. Fiscal services at 1.76 per cent and community education at .23 per cent round out expenditure categories.

A vast majority of spending - 83.3 per cent - takes place to cover salaries and benefits, while the remaining 16.7 per cent is earmarked for services, materials and supplies.

“We spend slightly less than the average on personnel costs. We have more schools, smaller schools and our insurance costs and utility costs are slightly higher,” Slepicka said, adding a contributing factor is the fact that almost half of MVSD students require transportation.

In fact the division ranks the sixth highest total annual kilometers driven in the province, while sitting 20th out of 36 divisions in terms of enrolment.

“We have more buses, more mileage, which puts our supplies budgets up higher.”
When it comes to money spent in the classroom, there are two main areas of focus, MVSD superintendent and CEO Stephen Jaddock said.

In the area of student learning - which involves numeracy, literacy and credit attainment - protecting front line services by maintaining teacher ratios is the main focus for 2024-25, he said, along with adding education assistant hours.

“We are looking at a little bit of a pressure point on our educational assistance and this will bring us up to where we’re actually more in line with what we’re actually paying out for our educational assistance throughout the school year,” he said. “So we needed to do a little bit of a correction there. When we have students that come to our schools from other school divisions or they’re just new to the system and they require additional support then we do need to put in often times educational assistants to help with them, so we are wanting to make sure that our funding includes an increase for those hours.”

Other strategic initiatives include updating technology requirements, support for classroom supplies, instructional coaches, supporting industrial arts, human ecology and technical vocational instruction for Grades 7 to 12, reading recovery and alternative education, a high school apprenticeship facilitator and targeted professional development.

In the area of student well-being, strategic goals include safe and caring schools, student voice, indigenous education, and mental health and wellness.

The top budget focus for 2024-25 is proactive programming, Jaddock said.

“We want to make sure that our schools are continuing to participate in proactive programming. We do have an overall goal in Mountain View School Division to see a reduction in out-of-school suspensions, where we would like to make sure that students are in school and that we move to more of a restitution type model,” he said. “I mean there are situations where, for safety sake, we do need to have a not-in-school suspension, but we certainly want to reduce them overall, so that students can remain in school and have that contact time with the individual classroom teacher.”
With the provincial announcement around school nutrition, programming in that area is also a priority.

“To augment what is already happening in our schools, we have approximately an additional $275,000 to spend in that area,” he said. “The Province has stated that their goal is that no student should come to school hungry, and if they do, that they are being able to be looked at, looked after for breakfast and lunch. So that is the goal of the program in all of our 16 schools in Mountain View School Division.”

Budget attention was also given to the MVSD Student Voice Committee, resource and guidance, indigenous education framework, community connectors, social workers, staff wellness and mental health first aid.

“Coming through the COVID pandemic we find ourselves in what we call the echo pandemic, where the effects of the pandemic are now being felt and actually now coming out in the behaviors of students. Staff are on the front lines to have to deal with that. Also it’s no secret that many of the adults in our society have been affected by the pandemic, as well, and they need to remain healthy and they need to have support,” Jaddock said.

“So we want to make sure that we’re attending to that in Mountain View School Division.”

MVSD has until Mar. 15 to set its special levy and an adopted budget must be submitted to the province by Mar. 31.