The Assistant Superintendent for Hanover School Division says the Manitoba Rural Learning Consortium (MRLC) is having a very positive impact on schools.

Rick Ardies sits on the board of the MRLC. Friday, he accepted a cheque on behalf of the Consortium from the provincial government. The province provides funding of approximately $165,000 each year. Ardies says their first instalment Friday was for $80,000.

"MRLC is very thankful to the province of Manitoba for the ongoing funding, we're very dependent on it," stresses Ardies. "We believe that the work that we're doing in developing the professional capacity of teachers is very, very important and it's as teachers develop their skills and their crafts that students learn more."

According to Ardies, the Consortium has been around for about seven years. He explains, MRLC was designed to work towards building the capacity of rural teachers throughout Manitoba. The MRLC will schedule a series of professional development workshops throughout the school year and member divisions will send teachers to learn their craft. The focus the last couple of years has been on reading and numeracy.

Ardies says a lot of smaller divisions in the province do not have the budgets to bring in clinicians from across the country to help their teachers. He notes if they can get together as a network of school divisions, it makes more learning possible.

"Each year around five hundred teachers are attending the workshops and the member divisions talk very, very positively about the impact that that's had in their schools," says Ardies. "Certainly here in Hanover School Division, we've made great use of the workshops offered by the MRLC and we believe that the learning coach team that we have in Hanover, most of their training has come through the MRLC programs."

"It's good because it builds partnerships between the different school divisions," says Steinbach MLA Kelvin Goertzen, who presented the cheque Friday. "You can make a determination about where do you think there are challenges in a rural setting in terms of education and where can you fill some of those gaps and make benefit."

Goertzen says whether it's a school division or a health care system, any time you can build partnerships, it usually works to the benefit of everybody.