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The Rocky Mountain Goat News PM42164515
Thursday September 1st, 2016
Serving Valemount, McBride & the Robson Valley since 2010. Locally owned & operated.
Volume 7 Issue 35
Elementary school’s trees are pining away by EVAN MATTHEWS
Scoop on organic food A06
Soon enough, the Valemount Elementary schoolyard will have no pine trees. The pine trees currently in the schoolyard are dying, as pine beetles attacked them about eight years ago, according to Brett Apolczer, manager of the facilities services
department for School District 57 (SD57). As it stands now, the trees die and the district comes to take them away. They do not, however, replant any. “We don’t have a budget for replanting the trees,” says Apolczer. “Rather than just taking them all down, we’ve waited til they start dying off and we
go take 15 or 20 every year,” he says. In the last 10 years, Apolczer says the school district has taken down between 7,000 and 8,000 trees in the Prince George area due to steady attacks from the mountain pine beetle. However, if the school’s Parent Advisory Cont’d on A07
Towards resort construction A03
Metal Fest
A02 Photo: Evan Matthews
Paramedicine in Robson Valley A03 Listings on P15!
Prince George
Eye of the Raven A10
Mike Berkenpas stands in front of his re-built 1956 International that he salvaged from his wife’s family’s property. While spending $70,000 on a new truck may be for some people, Berkenpas says for him, watching the gauges and feeling the driveshaft through the steering wheel on this one of a kind vehicle is something you just don’t get with modern vehicles. Story on page A07.
Mental health initiative kicks off in Valemount by EVAN MATTHEWS
A group of local and committed individuals are making an effort to engage citizens in conversations about mental health, and reduce the stigma associated with it. Twenty per cent of Canadians will experience mental illness or languishing mental health in their lifetime, according to the CMHA, which means roughly 200 people in Valemount — 1,000 in the Robson Valley — (will) experience languishing mental health. Sue VandenBergh is the project lead of the Shared Care pilot project in Valemount, which has 25 members making up the Local Action Team. The Shared Care program is a collaborative partnership of the B.C. Ministry of Health and Doctors of B.C., according to its website, with the intent of supporting family physicians and specialist physicians in working together to improve the flow of patients from primary to specialist care since 2007.
The Shared Care Committee’s base funding is $6.5M, according to its website, and consists of four voting members from Doctors of BC and four voting members from the Ministry of Health. “We work hard, and creatively, to bring as many activities and things to the people of Valemount,” says VandenBergh. “We have different challenges than other teams, as we are quite remote and have so few people.” The local action team hosted a free BBQ at the high school where interactive mental health conversations took place, she says, while earlier in the summer the organization took home third place for its float in the Valemountain Days’ Parade. The Stand Up for Mental Health Comedy Show was the same weekend as the parade, VandenBergh notes. Shared Care’s Local Action Team is funded by Northern Interior Rural’s Division of Family Practice, VandenBergh says, and they are just one of 64 teams across B.C. The team in Valemount has a lot of freedom for planning and ideas, VandenBergh says,
but everything has to be approved by the funders and has to have an impact on the community relative to its three objectives. The three goals, according to VandenBergh, are: • Reduction of Stigma and stereotyping around mental health • Youth recruitment and empowerment • Community awareness and resource mapping A main goal of Valemount’s local action team, VandenBergh says, is to provide Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training (ASIST). Rural communities lack consistency in how to appropriately help an individual — specifically youth — who may be experiencing suicidal attempts or ideations, she says. Suicide attempts in Canada account for 24 per cent of all deaths amount 15-24-yearolds and 16 per cent among 25-44-year olds, according to the Canadian Mental Health Cont’d on A07