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By paNOW Staff

Dignity, comfort and safety of students

School divisions look to align policies with province directive on change rooms

Jan 28, 2025 | 2:00 PM

Prince Albert school divisions will soon begin navigating a directive from the province to create their own change room policies.

Last Thursday, the province announced it will require divisions to create and implement a policy on who can use which change rooms, and have that policy available by June 30. But Education Minster Everett Hindley explained the province won’t dictate what’s in the policies, except that they must support the “dignity, comfort and safety of all students.”

Robert Tessier is the Superintendent of Human Resources and School Operations for the Prince Albert Catholic School Division. He said school-based administrators are always working with student to ensure they can have openness and will always try to meet the needs of students and be sensitive to requests on a case-by-case basis.

“We just received the information, so we do need to make plans to see how this affects us and how it aligns with our current practices and we’ll look at our policies to see if there are any changes that we need to make,” Tessier said.

The Saskatchewan Rivers Public School Division said it would also take time to review the details of its own admin procedures ‘to ensure they align with the province’s mandate regarding change rooms.’

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Other school division in the province already have administrative procedures in place that deal with washroom and change room accessibility.

Mark Haarmann, director of education at Regina Public Schools, said he considers his division to be a provincial leader on the issue. Their procedures, which are already available on the division website, explain that students have the right to use the washroom and change room that matches their gender identity. It talks about staff consulting with the students and/or their parents or guardians on the students’ safety and comfort. The policy also talks about providing a reasonable alternative to students who want more privacy. Lastly, the procedure also talks about gender-neutral options.

“The division will ensure that gender-neutral washroom requests can be accommodated at all of our locations,” Haarmann said.

He explained that the current iteration of the administrative procedure has been in place for more than a year, and it’s been working.

“We’ve had one situation that I’m aware of that we were able to sort of work through by finding some accommodations that would have met the needs of all students, but in a general sense I’m assuming that there have been other ones that principals have handled by following the administrative procedure,” Haarmann said.

He said the division doesn’t see change room issues as something that’s happening regularly.

Saskatoon Public Schools said it also already has an administrative procedure on change room use which requires that students have safe washrooms and change rooms, and private spaces are provided at every school.

–With files from CJME.

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panews@pattisonmedia.com