The school board is getting frustrated with being the last to know and is airing the grievance with the Ministry of Education.

The Kamloops-Thompson School District board chair is writing the ministry to ask what happened to letting districts know about new provincial education initiatives before sending out news releases.

“We had what we thought was a protocol agreement to ensure close communication between partners,” said chair Denise Harper.

But that seems to have fallen by the wayside, she said.

“For a while we were getting releases after (the media), now we don’t get them at all. It’s just a bit of frustration and wanting to get things straight.”

An education ministry communications officer said he could find no such protocol agreement within his department.

The practice has always been that provincial press releases are sent to media and simultaneously posted to the ministry website, said Scott Sutherland.

Creating a separate email list for school boards would be too onerous so interested parties have been encouraged to subscribe to the ministry’s news feed.

That would ensure that they automatically receive news releases at the same time as everyone else.

When it comes to local initiatives, press releases typically contain quotes from local board chairs so they’re guaranteed to know about them.

“We will continue to work with stakeholders to ensure that they receive or have access to news releases in a timely manner,” he said.

“We will be working over the next couple of days to figure out how best to address this and make sure everybody knows how to do that.”

He also pointed out that the first the ministry learned of these concerns was through the Kamloops media.