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Clarke aiming to hold on to school board seat

Even though both her children have graduated, Shelley Clarke hasn’t lost interest in being a trustee for the Okanagan Skaha School District.
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Even though both her children have graduated, Shelley Clarke hasn’t lost interest in being a trustee for the Okanagan Skaha School District.

“It is still a big focus of my life,” said Clarke, explaining that she now gets more involved with the range of schools in the district.

It has a downside, though.

“When my kids were in school, I knew what events were going on in the schools at all times, now I have to work a little harder to find out,” she joked.

One of the biggest successes of this school board was also one of the hardest to deal with, according to Clarke, singling out the school closures the province forced them to look into.

“I still get grief about the school closure process,” said Clarke, calling it an “extremely painful.”

“We felt it had to be done, because we wanted to keep resources in the classroom for the kids, not paying for empty school buildings.

“And at the end of all of that, we made the government blink. They gave us the money we needed for the classrooms. If we hadn’t gone through that process, we would have been in worse shape than we had been for years.”


Steve Kidd
Senior reporter, Penticton Western News
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