By Chris Jaster
There will be fewer educational assistants at Maple Creek Composite High School next year, but it has nothing to do with budget cutbacks.
The Chinook School Division dropped three EA positions from Maple Creek’s high school because there wasn’t a need for them at that facility. The number of students who required EAs decreased, so the region shifted the three positions over to Sidney Street School, where they are needed.
“The number of people who don’t have EAs who need them are zero," said Lee Cummins, the superintendent of special education and student services for Chinook School Division. “Everyone has been allocated. There are no people without positions in terms of EAs in Maple Creek.”
That’s not to say, however, that cuts haven’t been made to the number of EAs working within the school division. A total of 28.8 full-time-equivalent (FTE) education assistant positions were cut within the school division. Six of the FTE positions were dropped because the delivery of services were changed — such as replacing a few EAs with one teacher — while the division deemed 10.3  FTE positions weren’t needed because the students were either leaving the system or they moved to another grade where the service is already available.
The remaining 12.5 positions were funded through the diversity formula that gave schools money to help students who could use support, but weren’t designated as Level 1 or Level 2 needs students.
“We allocated that funding to schools up front so they would have extra capacity so when needs came into the school that they could address them,” said Chinook’s director of education Liam Choo-Foo. “In practice, what we found was the schools found needs for those people already so when extra issues were there, the capacity wasn’t there and we had to add another EA. So, in an attempt to try to get our costs under control this year, we decided to pull back 50 per cent of our funding from the schools, which will save us approximately $400,000.”
The school division maintains, however, that every student who requires an educational assistant will have access to one during the school year. 
Although most students won’t notice these cuts in the classroom, high school students will notice there will be less time to deal with career counsellors. The division cut 3.4 FTE career counsellor positions for the 2010-11 school year, leaving only two people to look after the entire area.
As a result, the counsellors will mainly focus on Grade 12 students instead of helping students in grades 9, 10 and 11 prepare for life after high school.
“We had to narrow the priority,” said Cummins. “All schools will still have career counsellors, they just won’t be seen as frequently.”
To compensate for the lack of counsellors, the school division is going to emphasize students become more adjusted to Career Cruising, a computer program, and that teachers emphasize the career components that are built into every curriculum.
Despite this change, Cummins said schools will do their best to ensure students graduate and that this change won’t affect students’ opportunities to further their studies or find a job.
“We want to make sure students have the credits they need to graduate and the information they need to move on to their workplace or to further their studies,” she said.