One southwest school is looking to bring home some cash in the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation's student project.
The student project saw 30 schools from around the province submit a short video showing why their school is special.
Chelsea Fleishhacker is the communications consultant with the Saskatchewan Teachers’ Federation. She talked about why they decided to hold this project.
“Schools are a vital part of the community, and we wanted to take the opportunity to celebrate that,” she said. “The thought with the student project was to turn that over to the students and give them the opportunity to tell the story of their experiences in the school and in their community to the general public.”
Fleishhacker says that the project has gone very well so far.
“We actually very pleased with the turnout,” she said. “30 videos have been submitted to date. They’ve earned a total of 36,000 total views, and three of those videos have surpassed the 3,000 view mark.
Fleishhacker added that they expect more schools to enter, as a total of 41 schools can enter.
One of those three schools with over 3,000 is the Val Marie School.
Angela Clement is the principal of Val Marie School and said that they entered the contest as a way to bring the school together, but also have the students learn in the process.
"It looked like pretty good prize money, and it would supplement our school budget," she said. "We've done contests like this in the past, and it raises a lot of school spirit. It also meets outcomes as far as the arts education curriculum with the videoing. The students learned a lot about how a video is made and how it can be edited. I think for those reasons it was a no-brainer that we needed to do it."
The video saw the students come up with scripts and a parent of one of the students help with shooting and the editing of the video.
Clements said that for a school of only 42 students and nine staff, they are holding there own with some of the bigger schools.
"We are neck and neck with some schools in Lloydminster," she said. "It seems the video views are really close. We were around three thousand yesterday, and I see we've gone up a bit. We are very close."
Clement said that they've been able to keep pace with the bigger schools with support from the southwest.
"With the help of the wider community, we will be able to compete with them," she said. "We will definitely need that, and I know from past experience that the southwest is really good about helping out with these kinds of things and we really appreciate that."
The video with the most views wins $7,500, and each participating school has a chance to win the $10,000 grand prize through a draw. Clement said that they have all kinds of ideas for how they'd use the money.
"A couple of things we've talked about is some more sports equipment, we've talked about doing some more music equipment for the gym, there have been lots of things flying around, but we've made any plans yet."
The Val Marie school currently sits at over 3,500 views and sits second in the contest.
The contest ends June 11 with the winning school announced on June 13.
Tue, Apr 23, 1:00 PM
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