ATHABASCA — A former educator has thrown his hat in the election ring, again.
Current Aspen View Public Schools (AVSP) trustee Dennis MacNeil said he’s not finished with being a trustee and, voters willing, he would like the chance to tick a few more goals off the list.
“There's still lots to do – rural advocacy is one, creating opportunities for kids of course, and community engagement is a huge piece,” said MacNeil. “And now with the new curriculum coming out there's certainly a lot of concern and a lot of advocacy that needs to be done there on behalf of the kids of our province.”
Originally from Nova Scotia he moved to Alberta after spending 13 years in Ontario, but it was here he met his wife and decided to get out of constructing buildings and into shaping minds.
"I was in building construction; I was a carpenter (and) I thought I'd like to go back to school and get my teaching degree so, my wife supported me while I went to university, and I got a teaching job at St. Joseph High School in Edmonton, where I was teaching building construction.”
For six years he drove from Colinton to Edmonton, before landing a job at the Boyle School. Then he was teaching students at Landing Trail Intermediate School in Athabasca when a position came open at another AVPS school.
“I applied for a job in Rochester, and got the principalship there and was there for close to eight years before I retired,” said MacNeil.
Retirement only meant continuing on in education in another aspect so he ran against the incumbent in the Rochester area and after winning started the first of his goals; reduce the number of AVPS trustees.
“One of the first things I did as a trustee was to take on a committee that looked at the reduction – at that time there were nine trustees – and so, I headed up a committee to look at the reduction of numbers of trustees,” he said. “And at that time, we were looking at reducing to either seven or five trustees. My preference would have been would have been five, but seven works really, really well.”
Short term, he’s looking at the return to school the end of August, remaining hopeful it will go smoothly.
“I think the biggest issue right now is what's going to happen in the fall. I mean, we're open for the summer but are we going to be closed for the fall? Although many of us have been vaccinated we're not quite sure of how effective it's going to be against some of those variants, especially the Delta variant so, we're keeping our fingers crossed for sure.”
An important mid-range goal is the proposed curriculum that has received a lot of negative feedback.
“We're not saying the curriculum is all bad; we're just saying, ‘You know what? Let's put the brakes on here and take a closer look at it,’” said MacNeil. “And with the pandemic and all that's been going on, now is not the time to be implementing a new curriculum. Let's give our teachers and our kids an opportunity to kind of get back to some sort of what normal looks like, so that we can actually do a proper job of piloting a new curriculum.”
And long-term MacNeil looking at promoting rural sustainability and lobbying the government to focus on the growing issue as well.
“Probably the most important thing is the curriculum; keep pushing for some changes in the curriculum postponement ... as much as possible; that would be one thing. I think rural sustainability is an incredibly important thing as well and I want to continue to looking at how we can increase engagement in the community,” said MacNeil. “Yeah, those would be the things I would really like to work on.”
