Community Bonds To Move A School
Sunday, April 28, 2013 @ 3:06 PM
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(Volunteers clean front and back school grounds in preparation for opening day Monday. Photos – 250 News)
Prince George, B.C. – Moving from one school to another is a monumental task. Doing it in the course of six days is herculean. But that’s exactly what the people at the Highglen Montessori School have accomplished.
Highglen was hit by a fire that originated in a classroom at the northwest corner of the building. Principal Karin Paterson says although the flames themselves were contained to that one area, the entire inside of the school, from one end to the other, has a thick black covering the result of the acrid black smoke emanating from the blaze. Bottom line is the school cannot be used in its present condition. The cause of the fire is yet to be pinpointed and insurance adjustors have to determine the building’s future.
Paterson says the most pressing question, what to do to allow the 236 students and 20-plus staff to complete the school year, was answered at a strategy session with School District 57 Superintendent Brian Pepper last week. That resulted in a site tour of Gladstone Elementary, which had been closed in district cutbacks, formulation of a plan to make the move in a week’s time, and getting maintenance work at Gladstone underway.
Paterson says there has been overwhelming support from throughout the district. Her staff was given space at Westwood Elementary to operate from “to think about our inventory, our needs, planning for day one, doing the re-grouping we have to do as a team.” She says her priority was being firm about the vision, making sure it is “mission first, team second, individual third. My job is to keep people on the straight and narrow, all pointed in the same direction. We care about public education, and Montessori is one piece of a greater community here. And we just got lots of outpourings of support from every aspect of our greater community and generous that was but it required a great deal of co-ordination. So finding point people very early in the game was really important.”
She says people have said “here’s some stuff, to here’s some money, to offers to supply technology, manpower, you name it every direction. We have the Prince George Motessori Society running a silent auction fundraiser, everything you can imagine. But we wanted to be very sure that we were going to getting a Montessori quality in our school. It is a highly expensive program because of the vision that Dr. Montessori had, and we’re going to try to hold fast and still accept the generosity of people and decide then how that generosity plays out.”
Paterson says “the school district has a mandate to supply us with the essentials and they’ve been doing that. They’ve been working 24/7 to move mountains for us. My staff has been scrambling to get us the essentials that are required in every school. Anything that is furniture, there are sites that they store these extra items in. The schools were notified that if they had extra chairs and tables, to let the district know. We went to our office supplier to begin to give us things like pencils, crayons, paper, erasers, the basics. We had the IT team re-deploy purchases that are going to go into other schools and will be replaced to still meet their timelines so that my teachers can still have their computers. They had a new PA system put in, lights were re-done, electrical re-done, there were walls that weren’t in place here that had to be put back in. The amazing thing is it’s all happening at the same time.” She says each person has contributed “above and beyond” to the effort to get the Montessori school up and running in a week.
The activity at the school on Gladstone was extraordinary on Sunday. While scores of people (the parking lot was filled with vehicles and many more parked on the street) worked on getting rooms and their contents in order inside, volunteers, both young and old, gathered on the school grounds to pick up litter which has accumulated since the school was closed.
So what effect(s) will changing location have? Paterson says “in terms of functioning, my teachers like to say “You could do the Montessori education on a desert island with nothing, because it is a mindset. So, as I say, mission first, we uphold the values that created a Montessori education in the first place. My team will be here. We don’t know yet about changes in enrolment but right now I’ve got the same team and we’ll work in the same direction we’ve always worked. Maybe we’ll have to be a little more focused to keep that quality high. I would say the thing that will be substantially different are “the things”. And we all know it’s not things that really improve quality of life, it’s the two things above that, our team working together and the values that we uphold.”
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