Chinook Board of Education starts viability review for Tompkins School

Posted on 26 October 2026 by Ryan Dahlman

By Matthew Liebenberg

mliebenberg@prairiepost.com

The Chinook Board of Education has officially initiated a formal review of Tompkins School due to low student enrolment.

Board members approved a motion to start the school review process during a regular meeting of the Chinook Board of Education, Oct. 13.

“It’s not an easy decision and one that we wish we weren’t going down,” Board Chair Dianne Hahn said during an interview with this newspaper, Oct. 16.

This sentiment was also expressed by other board members during the consideration of the motion at the board meeting.

Katelyn Toney, the subdivision 4 trustee for the Gull Lake, Tompkins and Wymark areas, told the meeting she feels the weight of this motion just as deeply as any other parent or community member.

“Tompkins is my community,” she said “It’s where my own children grew up and walked through those school doors every morning. I know that building. I know the dedicated teachers and staff who give it life. And I know exactly what that school means to our community, because it has been a part of my family’s life too.”

Toney added that she has to balance her deep personal feelings for the community with her governance responsibilities as a trustee.

“True support for a community doesn’t mean avoiding hard conversations,” she said. “As a trustee, I will not pretend that ultra-low enrolment and further declining enrollment isn’t a crisis. I know that this motion is hard to stomach. I know it brings fear and anxiety about what comes next.”

She emphasized that this motion is aimed at initiating a process to do a detailed review of the school.

“Voting to initiate this review is not the board voting to close Tompkins,” she said. “We are voting for an honest, open and formal evaluation where every piece of data, enrollment numbers, operating costs and educational supports are laid out on the table for everyone to see. Most importantly, it opens a formal public consultation process.”

Tompkins School provides learning for students from kindergarten to Grade 5. The current enrolment of 10 students places it below the enrolment guidelines that requires a school review.

Chinook School Division policy determines that a kindergarten to Grade 5 school must maintain a minimum enrollment threshold of 18 students while the Ministry of Education regulations require an enrolment of 30 students.

Hahn noted that enrolment projections for Tompkins indicate that the number of students is expected to drop slightly from the current enrolment.

“The enrolment is the key factor that played a role in triggering it,” she said about the reason for the review. “As part of the review, there’s other things that are taken into consideration, but initially that is what triggered it.

The school review became necessary after the school community council for Tompkins School did not want to consider the closure of the school.

“They were given an option to voluntarily close and if that had been done, we wouldn’t have gone through this review,” Hahn explained. “However, they did not want to voluntarily close, because obviously they still want to keep their school open. So then we passed a motion to formally review the school and notices of intent were given out the next day to the school community council as well as to the provincial government, and notices were posted in different places throughout the school community.”

This will be a community-led review and the Chinook School Division will not be represented on the school review committee. The members of the committee will be municipal representatives and school community council members. Local municipalities have already been invited to appoint representatives to the committee.

The committee will have several months to gather information as part of its review. Criteria that will be considered during the review process include projected enrolment, the physical condition of the school, operational costs, the number of grades combined in each classroom, gender balance, potential financial savings and costs for relocation, transfer and effective use of staff, student safety issues and community impact.

“They will also do some community consultations through that review,” she said. “By February we will have those results as a board and then we will review the committee’s findings. If we decide to consider a closure, we have to pass a motion and hold a community meeting and then in April we need to make our final decision.”

Hahn emphasized that the Chinook Board of Education has only approved a motion for a school review and all information gathered during the process will be considered before a decision is taken about the school’s future.

“I think the focus just needs to be first on the students and the community,” she said. “Every discussion will be driven by the genuine care for the students and respect for the Tompkins community.”