When Lorianne Bertrand was in Grade 3, she made a go at teaching her grandmother to read. Still herself new to making meaning of vowels and consonants strung together in seemingly nonsensical combinations, she figured out how to teach this practice to somebody many years her senior.
As is reported in our page five story this week, Lorianne made a career of this desire to empower those closest to her. This month she retired from her role as principal of St. John’s Elementary School, where she spent three decades building a learning environment that focused on and celebrated students’ individual strengths, rather than measuring them by how they met, or failed to meet, the curriculum handed down from the province.
Her ability to do this is in part thanks to the smaller size of her school. In her time as principal, the student population doubled from six classes to the 12 that will be starting at the school this September when 177 students walk through its doors.
But more important to her leadership at the school was her profound knowledge of and commitment to the community she was serving. She attended high school in Campbell’s Bay, and then went on to see several generations graduate from the elementary school. She knows not only the students, but also their parents and their grandparents by first name. Many of them have her personal cellphone number. She knows the students’ family histories, and the challenges some of them may face at home. She knows what makes them angry, and in what conditions they thrive, when to challenge them, and when to give them space to grow on their own terms.
As her friend and school board director Jennifer Dubeau put it, this is rare. Most often, principals are not from the community where they work. They do great jobs, no doubt, and give great care to the schools they’re tasked with leading, but true commitment to a place brings something irreplaceable to the job. Supporting the next generation of students, wanting the best for them, becomes not simply a professional duty, but critical to the success of the community in which one lives, on which one is dependent.
This used to be commonplace. People worked in the same communities where they learned to walk. There were jobs where they grew up, jobs that enabled them to contribute to building and supporting their immediate communities. But this is less common now. Today’s world tells us that success is achieved at a distance from that which raised us; that to make something of ourselves, we need to establish independence from the no doubt complicated network of forces that formed us. The globalized world has also stripped most communities of the local jobs that kept people there. So the ability to return, even when it is desired, is often quite limited.
But when possible, and especially for those positions that have at their core the work of building relationships and supporting neighbours, let’s hope local people are in positions to step up to the plate. Because communities are stronger when people who know them intimately and have vested interest in their longevity are the ones leading them.