Welcome back everyone!  Hope you had a happy, safe and restful summer.

On behalf of the Toronto Association for Parents in Catholic Education (TAPCE), I would like to welcome you all as we look forward to working together during this school year. This past year, the volunteer parents of TAPCE delivered valuable training to parents through our CSAC workshops; updated our website (www.tapce.ca) to be more user-friendly and to address parent-related issues; continued to work with a single point of contact at the TCDSB (our liaison); as well, achieved non-profit and charitable status.

This year promises to be exciting and challenging. Certainly it is great to see our children to move through our system, learning and developing. As parents, we will be faced with a few key issues this school year. Foremost in our minds, is the issue of the Board supervision, particularly the appointment of a new Supervisor, Mr. Richard Alway, and what that might entail for us. Mr. Alway’s mandate is to build on the positive accomplishments of his predecessors, Mr. Hartmann and Mr. Forma, and to establish a new governance model for the Board which will help to refocus the role of the Board Trustees, support increased student achievement, increased accountability and transparency, good governance, financial sustainability and increased public confidence.

TAPCE will continue to remain abreast of the activities and decisions at the Board and monitor any possible affect on our children. We need to be both proactive and reactive. TAPCE looks forward to working with Mr. Alway in the very near future to offer our input into the formation of the governance model and to offer our support in any way possible.

Over the past year, TAPCE has been delivering information and training directly to CSACs through our “TAPCE Road Show”.  If you are interested in hosting a 15 minute TAPCE Road Show at the beginning of one of your CSAC meetings this year, we ask that you contactus@tapce.ca to put us on your agenda.  We have applied to Revenue Canada and look poised to receive our ability to issue tax receipts. This will enable us to carry out fundraising to afford us the ability to offer more support to TCDSB parents.

We encourage you to appoint a TAPCE liaison representative at your Annual General CSAC Meeting. Your TAPCE representative will be able to attend our monthly meetings, participate in the roundtable discussions on issues which affect all our students and receive valuable information to bring back to your CSAC. We also remind you of the upcoming CSAC Conference at the CEC on November 14, 2009, and we invite you to visit our website for more information on this event.

As parents, we all need to be well informed of the ongoing issues surrounding the education of our children. Only if we work together, united and strong, can we hope to continue to nurture the gift of Catholic education.

I look forward to working with you on behalf of TAPCE during the 2009-2010 year.

Sincerely,

God Bless,

Robert Selvadurai

TAPCE President

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