New SD50 superintendent plans for core skills, life outcomes
When Lisa Bernoties started her first job as a school superintendent, she gathered a team to look at student data no one was seeing.
The team looked well beyond grad rates.
What courses did students graduate with? How did that change their life outcomes?
Who got suspended, for how long, and was it in or out of school? Who got special-education designations for behaviour or mental-health issues?
Bernoties said her team assumed nothing. They pulled all the information they could get, and asked everything they had data to answer.
But what they found confirmed her hunch going in.
“It became extremely clear that there were persistent gaps of inequity for children of Indigenous ancestry, and for children with diverse abilities and disabilities,” Bernoties said.
It was “easy not to find, if you don’t want to.”
The year was 2011, and Bernoties was the new school superintendent in the Sea to Sky school district around Pemberton, home of the Lil’wat Nation.
She and her family had just moved to an off-grid cabin north of town with a woodstove for heat and an unfreezing mountain lake for power and water.
Bernoties grew up in Ontario, where she was a track athlete through high school and university. She played varsity volleyball at Western, where she took an undergraduate degree in kinesiology, then a master’s degree that combined kinesiology and the psychology of learning.
Hoping to escape Ontario to enjoy sports and the outdoors in supernatural B.C, Bernoties did her teaching degree at UBC. She and her husband got drawn back to Toronto for a while, but on a second try they made it to Kelowna.
Over the next 13 years, Bernoties worked in Kelowna as a teacher, vice principal, principal and then director of instruction — a role in larger school districts where she oversaw teaching for about 5,500 students.
So, when Bernoties landed near Pemberton, she came with experience and a good idea how to approach the job.
For one thing, she kept up her love of sports, coaching the seniors girls’ basketball and volleyball teams.
“That keeps you closer to the kids and the teachers in the schools,” she said. “It feels good.”
She also took a two-track approach to the love of her career: strategic planning.
“I know that might not be everybody’s favourite thing,” she said.
“I really value creating a vision for student learning that comes from community, and is supported by research.”
Bernoties agreed that sometimes, such plans end up sitting on a shelf, unused.
But when it’s evidence-based, and carried out by teachers, support staff, parents and community groups, she believes a good plan can change lives.
In Sea to Sky, the plan her team came up with made big changes to the curriculum, introducing core competencies every student should have.
“We wrote our own version,” she said, noting that the Lil’Wat gifted the schools the use of a medicine wheel to frame what it means to be a well-rounded student.
“That was the beginning of the story, and then we just rallied as a team. The parents and the First Nations communities advised us. Our board was on board, and held us highly accountable.”
Over the next few years, the five-year graduation rate for all students steadily rose. By the time Bernoties left, it was in the high 90s.
Sea to Sky got lots of shout-outs after that.
In 2019, Bernoties won the Premier’s Award for Excellence in Education for how she led the district. The Ministry of Education has now adopted a core-competencies approach province-wide.
But even with graduation rates high across the board in Sea to Sky, data showed Indigenous students still weren’t getting as much as other students from their highschool diplomas.
Many were graduating without the higher-level math and science courses that are a ticket to university, college and trades programs. At one point, the whole district had just one Indigenous student taking Calculus 12.
“You can see the racism,” Bernoties said. “It’s white supremacy in the higher-level courses. And then you look in the courses that have the unintended effect of streaming, and it would be 40 or 50 per cent First Nations students.”
After 10 years in Sea to Sky, Bernoties moved on to a province-wide role helping several districts develop strategic plans.
But much as she loves plans, Bernoties missed being involved in the follow-through.
So when her colleague and friend Manu Madhok invited her to share the superintendent role for the Haida Gwaii School District, she took the opportunity to get her feet on the ground again.
Bernoties arrived on Haida Gwaii in August, and will live here half the school year. She and Madhok will share the superintendent role 70/30.
The Haida Gwaii News recently got a letter from a parent concerned about superintendents working remotely.
“That’s fair,” Bernoties said. “I do understand the importance of being here.”
Haida Gwaii is a different place, and Bernoties said she’s enjoying getting to know it, and the people here.
She is already running plays with the senior girls volleyball team at GidGalang Kuuyas Naay, and is working to get StrongStart up and running at the new Daaxiigan Sk’ada Née kindergarten to Grade 12 school in Masset.
Bernoties said she believes the staff, teachers, support staff, principals, and parents in the district are all super committed, and she knows the board is.
“I don’t think there’s anything more important in our societies and our cultures than our children.”