Pre-Cam Community School has a student population of 400. It's a kindergarten to grade 6 school in La Ronge, situated on Lac La Ronge which is the largest northern community with a population of approximately 4500. The
school staff is active in implementing the province's Core Curriculum along with Northern Lights School Division initiatives.
In March 2011, a committee comprised of three Pre-Cam School Community Council (SCC) members and school staff including the vice-principal and the physical education teacher, created a Physical Education and Physical Activity Policy to demonstrate their commitment to physical education and physical activity in their community school.
The committee recognized that Saskatchewan kids are not active enough for optimal health benefits and that children and youth should get a minimum of 60 minutes of physical activity every day. Through a shared responsibility, they could work together to ensure kids received 30 minutes of physical activity at home, 30 minutes of physical activity in the community, and 30 minutes of physical activity at school. The committee also realized that physical activity enhances academics and education as a whole – from increased attention and less behaviour issues – to improved learning, fitness, and health. During the policy development process, only a few challenges incurred such as coordinating meeting schedules and building relationships with the members. The group wanted to ensure there was comfort in the process when thinking about the physical activity benefits while recognizing the positive current practices.
Before the Physical Education and Physical Activity Policy was presented to the full SCC and staff and ultimately approved by the Pre-Cam Community School Staff in June of 2011, a series of procedures was developed and rated on a scale of 1 to 10 for identification and priority setting. The procedures, ranked in order of importance, which are adhered to as part of the overall physical education and physical activity policy, are as follows:
- Ensuring that the school follows the minimum mandated Ministry of Education's Physical Education Curriculum.
- Being a Quality Daily Physical Education (QDPE) School.
- Being a Saskatchewan in motion elementary school which means providing physical activity for at least thirty minutes each day,including recess for all staff and students.
- Ensuring students are introduced to a variety of activities where participation versus winning is rewarded and that they mayadopt a lifelong healthy behaviour.
- Access to a variety of school equipment for physical activity.
- Ensuring that partnerships are formed within the community in order to introduce students to physical activity opportunities in the community and families and community residents in the school.
- Adopt policies that support the use of active forms of transportation for students to and from the school grounds.
- Enforce the no-idling/drop off policy making the school a safe place for students to use active transportation to get to andfrom school.
- Joint use of facility agreement in the community.
- Ensuring that students have access to lunch or after school extra-curricular and recreational programs that offer physical activity opportunities in a non-intimidating manner.
- Enforcing a no-cut policy with extra-curricular and recreational programs.
- Ensuring that all students have recess and are provided with safe, supervised playgrounds and opportunities to be active at recess.
- Ensuring Aboriginal cultural relevant and gender equity in physical education and physical activity.
- Ensuring that all staff understand the importance of physical activity in the school, classroom, and are incorporated into subject areas and also offered as a reward for when their classes do well.
- Enforcing a "no punishment" rule where physical education class cannot be removed or used as punishment.
The committee's hope is that the policy continues to strengthen the physical education and physical activity opportunities in their community school as well as serve to recognize and celebrate the current physical activity opportunities and procedures.