Building a relationship with the Limestone District School Board

As much as Conference2Classroom facilitates science communication, engagement, outreach and education  events across Canada, our home is in Kingston, where we were founded. Conference2Classroom founder Rachel Kuzmich is a proud geographer and could write ad nauseum on the importance of place, but suffice to say we feel it is important to build a good relationship with our home community. We are after all in a way a community organization in that we are striving to bring communities together and create new meaningful connections between people who might not otherwise interact.

​So we have been talking to the Limestone District School Board (LDSB) about how we can work together.

Our first opening to LDSB was accidental, Rachel was travelling to Burlington and had a rideshare with a high school teacher at ​Kingston Collegiate and Vocational Institute. Teachers have been particularly excited about the possibilities of bringing experts in their classrooms to complement the curriculum, and for the duration of the drive we chatted about integrating Conference2Classroom in a more regular manner to classrooms across the school board.

This led to email exchanges and eventually conversations with people from the school board and at the schools. We spoke with an individual working in equity and inclusion at LDSB who was particularly interested by our shared mission to improve accessibility to more rural and remote schools. One school is interested in collaborating through an interactive realtime broadcast program they have with other schools. Rachel will be heading to that school next month to speak with students and learn more about the facilities and technology so that she can provide better information for participating experts who may take advantage of this same platform.

It's a new relationship, we are excited to develop it over time and collaborate closely with the LDSB and the broader Kingston community.