ATHABASCA — Sometimes we drift like a feather on the wind, not sure where to land on a job or location, and sometimes we know right away what and where we want to be in life.
The latter was the case for now-retired Aspen View Public Schools (AVPS) deputy Supt. Dr. Karen Penney, who knew, even growing up in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, she wanted to be a teacher and to do that job in northern Alberta.
“It was always my dream to be a teacher,” Penney said in a June 20 interview. “And it was always my dream to come and work in northern Alberta.”
The jobs were leaving the area and Cape Bretoners were moving to Alberta, including former teacher and current AVPS trustee Dennis MacNeil.
“(There was a) huge steel plant there at the time that eventually shut down; no jobs. So, everybody left to move to Alberta and Dennis is one of them. Dennis grew up down the street from me, but I didn't know him,” she said.
So, Penney packed up her things and moved west in the fall of 1982, but the teaching job didn’t come right away.
"It’ll be 40 years this September,” said Penney. “I worked in Calgary for a while, tried to figure out a way to get myself north; met people who told me how to get a job up north. It took me the better part of about eight months after that, but eventually landed in Wabasca as my first teaching position.”
She stayed within the Northland School Division (NSD) for 26 years, making her home at Little Buffalo, or Lubicon Lake, as it’s known.
“I moved into (the NSD) central office for a while, but (teaching) was certainly in my heart and still is to this day,” she said. “After that I moved to Peace 10 (Peace River School Division) for about 10 years and then here for three-and-a-half.”
In those three-and-a-half short years, most of them dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, Penney was able to put a her own mark on the division, including the raising of the Treaty 6 and Métis Nation of Alberta flags at the central office June 16.
“The goal was for it to happen a lot sooner than it did. I've had those flagpoles sitting in the warehouse for three years. It's one of the areas I worked a lot on in my former position and just knew that there were a lot of good things happening here, but we needed to heighten the profile a bit more and really bring reconciliation to the forefront,” she said.
"The truth part has been highlighted a lot and it's time to move forward with the reconciliation piece or, some people say the reconcili-action piece, and that's what the flag raising did. And the other things that we've done this year is really to highlight we have to act; it's not good enough to just talk.”
Just before arriving at APVS though, in 2018 Penney defended her thesis titled, Cultural Proficiency for Indigenous Student Success at Western University and earned her doctorate.
The 112-page document focused on the cultural proficiency to support off-reserve Indigenous student services and organizational improvement plan.
“(Off-reserve) students bring strong epistemologies and ontologies that are not currently acknowledged or employed by the dominant society and should be explored to determine how best to accommodate this group of marginalized students,” Penney wrote in the abstract.
“This entails a social justice imperative to champion for the disadvantaged, marginalized and othered in a small, rural school division. Furthermore, culturally proficient leadership is explored as one way to advocate for this group of students through the creation of culturally proficient schools, led by culturally proficient leaders who value students because of their diversity rather than in spite of it.”
But, if there was one thing she wishes could have been accomplished, or been further along, before she retired, is that it was more grassroots interaction.
“If I could have done one more thing, and I'm pretty happy with what we did accomplish, the one piece is more work with school councils, the grassroots people in the communities, and I know that that piece will be picked up next year,” said Penney.
But she wasn’t hired solely for developing and teaching about Truth and Reconciliation, Penney has always had more to work on.
“I’m responsible for the education plan, which of course changed in the last three years from an accountability plan to an assurance plan,” she said. “So, we're just in the process of turning over into that.”
Penney will be happy to pass some responsibilities over though; she’s never claimed to be a tech professional.
“One of the things that I started that I'll be happy to pass on to the next person is the way we record our data from assessments and other things that we follow so it's easy for teachers to pull up that data,” she said.
She also made sure the robotics tournament, held this year at Thorhild Central School May 11, was up and running.
"I started in January (2019) so for the first six months, I learned, watched, listened and then in the fall, I said we will have a robotics tournament,” she said. “Well, of course, we were planning it and then COVID hits.”
Where others would have thrown up their hands and walked away, Penney took it as a challenge and made sure it got done.
“I just couldn't leave with that still on hold,” said Penney. “I thought ... we can do this. Let's do it but with no idea how to do it. There was a committee that changed it a little bit to have a few more people on it and I couldn't be prouder of them.”
Penney also figured out why many students weren’t taking advantage of opportunities at Alberta Pacific Forestry Inc.
“I asked what the barriers were for students attending (a) tour,” she said. “Some people said the students didn't have steel toed boots, which they needed and so I said, well, let's buy them steel toed boots not really knowing where I’d get the money for it, but you can get relatively inexpensive steel toed boots. It ended up being less than a $2,000 investment and we had 21 students attend the tour.”
And as her time at AVPS winds down, Penney is making plans to return to Cape Breton for a while, to spend time with her 90-year-old mother, but she will be returning to Athabasca, to the area which called to her all those years ago.
“It was never my intention to retire, but it's time,” said Penney. “At some point there's others who can take up the challenge and do a better job. So, I'm happy. I feel I'm leaving on a high note, but I'm happy to pass the baton, to those younger and more capable with technology and willing to take on the changes that are happening.”
Other AVPS staffing changes
Katherine Mann will become associate Supt. of curriculum and technology and Kim Carson is reassigned from human resources to the associate Supt. of human resources and student services.
Paul Feledichuk took over as manager of facilities and operations from David Kwiatkowski May 6 and as of the 2022-2023 school year former Boyle School assistant principal Larry Irla will be the Grassland School principal, Sean Morrison will become principal of the CAVE (Centre for Alternative and Virtual Education), leaving his assistant principal position at Edwin Parr Composite (EPC).
Caitlynn Chernish, principal from Smith School, will be taking over Irla’s Boyle School position and Jason Mestinsek from Grande Prairie fills the position left by Morrison at EPC and Amber Hensch moves from teaching at Smith School to being principal taking over from Chernish.
