Ryan McGuire
Ten years ago, my wife and I were ready for a new adventure – one that would take us away from the irreverent grind of the city and allow us to explore the beauty that we had mostly just read about in school textbooks or saw in pictures. We had been offered teaching jobs in Northeastern British Columbia and without hesitation, we loaded up our car and started the long journey from the Golden Horseshoe to the Peace River.
Not a single inch of space was left unoccupied in our vehicle. We were ready. to. GO! The mountains were calling! We drove an old, yet reliable sedan that was gifted to us by friends. They encouraged us not to take it on the highway since it had 325,000 kilometres on the engine. We of course decided to take it on the Trans-Canada highway for a good 4000 kms, and that’s where the real adventure began! We were so loaded down that I had to plan ahead to use the breaks. This was not an ideal situation to be in driving through 16 lanes of traffic on the 401 near Toronto. Just a few hours into our drive, we half unpacked the vehicle and Greyhound-shipped a load to BC.
But we weren’t out of the woods with vehicle drama … Not far past Thunder Bay, ON we started to smell engine oil while barreling down a hill. We stopped the car, looked under the hood, under the car, and any other place we could think of to try and pinpoint the source of the foreboding smell. The last place I looked was under the seats, where I discovered a bottle of fuel injector cleaner that had been crushed by the seat tracks. At least it wasn’t the motor! That smell of oil never did completely come out of the carpet.
Dawson Creek was not the mountain town we had hoped for. Bear Mountain’s vertical from sea level is 950m, but you only see the top 300m due to the fact that Dawson Creek is already sitting at 650m. Back in Southern Ontario, the Niagara escarpment (the mountains of the Golden Horseshoe) sit just 228m above Lake Ontario. We wanted mountains, not more hills.
It wasn’t long before we discovered that Dawson Creek made for easy access to the north (Yukon, Alaska) and the south (Vancouver Island, Jasper, Banff). We put so many highway kilometres on that old car those first two years! The last tally on the sedan’s odometer before it wouldn’t start anymore was 375,000 kms, and we only needed to change the steering pump and muffler once. We sure did create fond memories half-recklessly exploring BC in our road worn old Chevy. But the most wonderful memory to date was discovering Tumbler Ridge – we fell in love with this place the moment we arrived! After six years of working in Dawson Creek and visiting Tumbler Ridge every chance we could, we threw caution to the wind in 2016 and relocated to this small mountain town we called our hidden Jasper.
The last four years have been a whirlwind! We bought a house, took advantage of the amazing trail systems here, created wonderful friendships, and came across a high school suddenly in need of a Vice Principal, and then a Principal. I had been a Vice Principal in Dawson Creek, so the progression felt natural. My years as an administrator at TRSS have been, if anything, a surprisingly steep and lengthy learning curve. The system that is public education, the thing that the public cannot see and the thing that no one prepares you for, is a tornado-like labyrinth of technology, rules, documents, policies, routines and forms. Educational leaders need to manage this, as well as managing curriculum, assessment, instruction, schedules, students, staff, the school building, health and safety, and a multitude of relationships with community members.
The role of the principalship, in particular, is complex, overwhelming, beautiful, interesting, invigorating, fascinating, frustrating, meaningful, exciting, depressing, fabulous, and precipitous all at the same time. It’s also occasionally perilous.
It has been a full 10 years: five years of teaching, five years of admin, and a Masters in Educational Leadership that I am still clawing at to finish. Our initial two-year plan to gain work experience and then leave for greener southern Ontario pastures quickly changed into a five-year and then a ten-year plan as new opportunities arose and more areas called out to us to be explored. The three core components of our ten-year plan were to work hard, grow, and explore as much as possible.
Taking the next right step in life is an artform, but it rarely is seamless and almost always leaves a mark. Sometimes it requires you to make a hard decision in a challenging time; it requires you to not worry about what others will say, or the specifics of tomorrow. For my wife and me, the opportunity to reset completely for a year has been in our conversations for several years – it is something we discussed at the start of Year 5 and then again this year. There was a point not long ago when we realized we could make it happen, so we decided to go for it!
This brings us to July 2020, when I will be stepping down from my role at Tumbler Ridge Secondary. It was a hard decision to make, and I did not make it lightly. I work with many wonderful people at the school – they are intelligent, hard-working, funny, tough, caring and passionate educators.
I have many fond memories of TRSS, including the go-kart project, the fish farm, Dragon’s Den, adventure race, town planning, and the staff and students who bring the whole thing to life. I wish everyone at Tumbler Ridge Secondary success, happiness and health in the years to come, and I wish our new principal (Brendan Bogle) and VP (Stacy Deeley) all the best for the 2020/2021 school year and beyond.
