Not that long ago, Holly Bryson was finishing up grade school in Flin Flon.
This year, she’ll be heading back to school in her hometown – only this time, her name will be on the classroom door.
For the first time since earning her education degree from Brandon University and moving back to the north, Bryson will begin the school year with a full-time job, teaching a Grade 2-3 split class at Ruth Betts Community School.
Bryson has worked with the school division for three years now, filling in as a substitute teacher and covering parental and illness leaves. Now, she has her own class.
“I came in for the first time on Wednesday and I saw for the first time that my name is now on the door of the classroom. To get my schedule and to see my name at the top, I feel proud that this is going to be my own class. Those years of work have paid off.”
Bryson is one of 10 new full-time teachers joining the Flin Flon School Division for the 2018-19 school year, and one of four people with area ties joining the division full-time.
Constance McLeese, superintendent of the Flin Flon School Division, said hiring teachers from Manitoba – with a focus on the north – was a priority.
“Ideally, you’d like to hire locally if you can,” she said. “We were able to do that with most of them.”
McLeese sees great potential in the new group, including Bryson.
“She has worked with us off and on. Now, we’re able to offer her a full-time contract. She’s been doing long-term occasional work – that’s what we’ve called it before. Now, she factors into our new teacher numbers, even though she’s very familiar for us.”
For Bryson, teaching is a family affair. Her mother, Kim, is a long-time school division employee who worked at École McIsaac School – the same school Holly attended until heading to Hapnot Collegiate.
Bryson worked as a mentor with Flin Flon schools before leaving for university. Some of her new coworkers even taught her growing up.
“It’s a surreal feeling, to go from a student looking up to my teachers to now being a coworker to some of those same teachers. The reason I became a teacher was because of some of the teachers I had in this division and their encouragement. They saw things in me that I didn’t necessarily see in myself,” she said.
“To now look across a room and see that same person sitting there and have them treat me as a coworker and not a student, it’s a very surreal feeling.”
During her university education, Bryson got to sample a different environment than the one she grew up in – 6,300 kilometres away, in Kuwait City, Kuwait.
“I knew that I always wanted to do an international placement, the opportunity to see other places and other cultures and how things are done in other countries,” she said.
That new environment brought its own distinctive challenges. In addition to having to learn about a very different education system, Bryson and her new students had to deal with sandstorms so severe that they would shut down classes.
“That was probably the craziest experience. They would say, ‘There’s going to be a sandstorm in five minutes,’ and the whole school clears out within a minute, and then soon after, it’s a blackout,” she said.
“I was in a classroom with five-year-olds. For them, it was the same as what we do for fire drills. There’s no panic or nothing, they just put on their little masks – because you can’t breathe the air outside – and away they go.”
With Kuwait and Brandon now in her rear-view mirror, Bryson has come back home with a sense of purpose. For many Flin Flonners, a university degree is a ticket to the big city and a way to escape the north. Bryson’s degree was the opposite – an invitation back home.
“I’ve always wanted to come back, but at the same time, it was a very hard decision to come back. This is my comfort zone. I have family, I know the school division, I know people here. It took a long time to make the decision that this is where I wanted to be and this was where I wanted to be teaching,” she said.
“This community made me who I am. There’s a reason I came back. There’s a reason I want to teach here. To be able to be a part of the community, to help out and hopefully better the lives of kids, it makes me feel like I’ve found my purpose. I’ve found a place where I belong.”
