Constance McLeese’s plan to become a United Church minister stemmed from her desire to make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.
When she eventually chose a different pathway, her goal remained the same.
“It became more obvious to me that if you were going to change the world – and I don’t mean proselytizing people to become Christian – but if you were going to make an impact and make the world a better place, the best place to do that was in education,” recalls McLeese. “Because that really is the most optimistic, future-oriented job that you can possibly can do. So life led me to where I needed to be.”
Indeed it did. Now 34 years after beginning her career in education, McLeese is the newly minted superintendent of schools for the Flin Flon School Division.
It’s a post that, depending on how it’s viewed, could carry a range of significant challenges related to declining enrollment, evolving expectations and, if critics of the new PC government are to be trusted, potential funding reductions.
But where others might see obstacles, McLeese sees opportunity. Yes, the division has lost nearly half of its student population since 1993, but in her view there are inherent advantages to smaller classrooms.
“There are a variety of ways of layering education and providing education so that you can continue with the quality service even if you have a very small school,” she says. “So the fact that you have maybe 300 kids at Hapnot is an advantage in some ways because…when it comes to student wellness and student engagement, with staff and students feeling that it’s a safe environment, statistically small systems do a lot better. In large systems kids get lost, they fall through the cracks. Small systems, it’s a lot harder to fall through the cracks.”
Understanding
McLeese brings a deep understanding of how to effectively operate a schooling system with limited student numbers. Her last job before moving to Flin Flon this summer was as senior education officer – essentially the superintendent – of the schools the Department of National Defence operates for children of military members stationed in Canada and overseas.
“We ran a school in Brunssum in the Netherlands where we had 60 high school students,” she notes. “That’s a really small high school, but [students received] an Ontario diploma, 30 credits, almost identical to what a Manitoba diploma looks like.”
Students in Brunssum relied on traditional in-person instruction along with distance education – the delivery of learning online. It’s a model that appeals to McLeese.
“It doesn’t mean there’s nobody in the classroom supervising the kids,” she says, clearing up a misconception about distance education. “It means that you have somebody who is the subject specialist who happens to be someplace else.
“The long and the short of it was, if the kid needed a course you figured out how to deliver the course and…it produced a lot of creative thinking and was actually pretty exciting.
“When it comes to resources for children, when it comes to any sort of specialized need, you can access all of that at a distance, and we have the technology in the [Flin Flon] school system to do that.”
Distance education is already utilized to an extent within Flin Flon School Division. McLeese says its use could grow, adding parents need not worry about the quality of education suffering if enrollment continues to drop. (Enrollment increased modestly last year, a sign that student numbers may have levelled off after years of decline).
Developments
The emergence of technology-based teaching tools is one of many developments McLeese has witnessed during a long and distinguished career in education that once seemed unlikely.
Originally from Westmeath, a tiny Ontario farming town, she was once so serious about becoming a United Church minister that she earned two degrees in theology.
After deciding she’d prefer education, she began teaching core French in Nova Scotia in 1982. In the ensuing years she taught multiple subjects at the public school and university levels across four different provinces.
McLeese spent three years in Ottawa in her position with the Department of National Defence before deciding it was time for something new. With the retirement of Blaine Veitch as superintendent in Flin Flon, she saw an opportunity that appealed to her for both professional and personal reasons.
“I have a skill set in running small [educational] systems. I like running a small system,” she says. “[In] small systems, if I need to have a chat with somebody about something that’s going on in the school, I can just walk over or hop in the car. It’s very immediate. Big systems, not so much. And at this point in your life, you like to feel that you’re making a bit of a difference. You like to know the people you’re working with. So it’s a quality of life thing sort of career-wise and personally, because there’s also a quality of life in a small community that we didn’t have in a big community like Ottawa. You get to a point and you go, ‘I’m tired of living in this big city.’”
Encouraged
Having started her new position earlier this summer, McLeese – believed to be Flin Flon’s first female superintendent of schools – is encouraged by what she has observed so far.
“This is an extremely well-run school board,” she says. “Now I can say this not because I have the job, but because my job for the last three years [with the Department of National Defence] has been running around inspecting school boards and school divisions all around the world to make sure that they were comparable to…the Ontario standard, because that’s where the Department of National Defence is actually located. But I’ve had a lot of experience visiting a lot of school boards, and it is absolutely obvious when I walk into a building here the pride and the resources and the importance and the value that this community places on education.”
As far as challenges go, McLeese believes Flin Flon is not unlike other small divisions.
“You have a large amount of work and [staff] stretching [themselves] too thin, that is a challenge,” she says.
McLeese’s solution is to ensure work is effectively prioritized and that staff take downtime when required.
“You don’t have to do everything the first week. You do it one step at a time,” she says.
McLeese is aware of criticism that the contemporary education system is watered down, that the quality of graduates is subpar compared to that of years past. She just begs to differ.
“There’s been almost what I would call a revolution in the last 20, 25 years in how [student] assessment and curriculums are designed, and it’s [about] trying to figure out what the kid knows, not what the kid doesn’t know,” she says. “It’s easy to figure out what a kid doesn’t know, but sometimes it’s trickier to find out what a kid does know.”
McLeese says today’s teaching approaches are more concerned with whether a student can actually achieve the objective of a course. If the aim is to write a complete sentence and a student needs 25 kicks at the can, then he or she takes those 25 kicks until success is achieved.
In McLeese’s view, education is moving down a more individualized path. It’s a trend she would like to see continue.
“What I’m hoping is that…fundamentally, when they say ‘individual education,’ it actually is individual education,” she says. “That every child – and we have the technology to be able to do that and track that – actually works at their own pace. And the roles of teachers change somewhat in that they’re not information givers, they’re learning coaches.
“The analogy I would use is that if your child can get it in three seconds on Google, then that’s not a good use of your teaching time. But you can coach children about how to learn and how to produce [outcomes] effectively so that the role of a teacher becomes mentor-coach instead of diffuser of information. And we’re already partway down that path, but in a perfect world that’s where we would all be because that would be the 21st century education. That would be allowing every child to reach [his or her] maximum potential.”
