Four Hanover schools that recently lost their permission to hold religious opening exercises have now had it reinstated.

April 30th was the Hanover School Board's imposed cutoff date for submitting petitions regarding the morning devotions. Neither Green Valley School, Niverville High School, Landmark Collegiate, nor Landmark Elementary School handed in their petition before that hard deadline.

However, Superintendent Randy Dueck stresses that each of those communities did have the required 60 parental signatures, they were merely late with their submission.

Board Chair Ron Falk says this tardiness was largely due to extenuating circumstances.

“In some of the communities, there was a turnover of people involved with leading the petitions and some information didn’t get passed on soon enough, in other communities the effort was too last minute.”

Falk and his fellow board members voted unanimously to waive their deadline and allow all schools with the required amount of signatures to provide the option of religious exercises. Though the board is admittedly backpedaling on their strict deadline, Falk does not expect this will set a precedent for future years.

“I think this is a bit of an anomaly,” he comments, “with everything that happened this year, I expect next year will run a lot more smoothly.”

Falk says some of the communities in question have already responded to the board’s gracious amendment, and are quite grateful.

Meanwhile, Dueck hopes that this whole situation will still be a learning experience for those areas that did not meet the initial criteria.

“Maybe this can serve as a reminder to the communities that it is their responsibility to make sure these petitions are in.”

As it now stands, all schools within the Hanover School Division will again have religious opening exercises in the 2019-2020 school year.


Read more: Four Local Schools Fail To Get Signatures For Religious Exercises