Monday evening it was announced that Kyle McIntyre would be taking over as the Director of Education for the Chinook School Division permanently.

McIntyre has been serving as the acting Director of Education since April of 2017 when Liam Choo-Foo was seconded by the Ministry of Education.

He said that he's excited to be able to remove the 'acting' portion from his title.

"I've been fortunate enough to work with Liam Choo-Foo for the last 16 years, and he's been a big mentor and supporter for me," he said. "I hope that if I have been paying attention I've learned a lot of directorship for him. I appreciate the board's confidence and the confidence that the staff was moving forward, and I look forward to the opportunity to serve students in the southwest."

The announcement was made at the Chinook School Board meeting on Monday afternoon.

McIntyre has served as the Deputy Director of Chinook School Divison since August of 2009 and takes over as director of education during a tough time for the Chinook School Division, as they are facing a lack of funding.

"It's a challenging time for education in the Chinook School Division right now," he said. "We will continue to try and make decisions to do what's best for kids with the resources that we have available. Part of my responsibility is to work with provincial politicians and with leadership in the ministry to try and make sure that the needs of kids in the southwest are served and to advocate for adequate funding for our students and for our schools, and certainly, that's going to be challenging."

McIntyre added that it's going to be key to work with the different stakeholders to continue to get what you need to be successful and that he's not one to back away from a challenge.

He says that the division held a focus group to try to set up a plan when they the know what their budget will be, come April 10.

"We had a personal and program focus group and what we did is we look at four areas," he said. "We looked at our existing staffing levels, our staffing formula, and we looked at some of our Chinook learning initiatives, some of our assessments and course opportunities for students."

The group featured 20 people from around the division in various positions to discuss what are things working in the division and what things they should stop doing and what they should try to innovate.

McIntyre added that they were able to get feedback from groups that are directly involved in certain fields that may be affected.

"We identified that we were doing lots of great things, but if our resources and supports change, we can't expect teachers to do everything that their doing," he said. "Our discussion was more about okay how do we continue to support teachers, how do we support kids. Something has to come off the plate, so if we have to take something off a teacher's plate what would that be."

McIntyre said that the direction our focus group gave was that they want the division to form additional committees to look at issues within the division.

Over his 27 year career in education, he has taught students from Grades 2 to 12, vice-principal, and principal and served as the Director of Education for the Eastend School Divison from 2002 to 2004.