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Archive for June, 2026

30 Things I Believe About Education After 30 Years

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , on June 23, 2026| 6 Comments »

For the past few years, I have ended the school year with a list. One reflection for every year I have worked in education. It has become a bit of a ritual for me. A way to mark the end of the year, make sense of what I am seeing, and say thank you to a profession that has shaped so much of my life.

The tradition has taken different shapes. In 2022, it was 26 teachers and the 26 lessons they taught me. In 2023, 27 ways schools are better than when I started. In 2024, 28 reasons to love teaching. Last year, 29 questions I am still asking about education.

This year feels different.

Thirty years is long enough to have seen trends come and go, long enough to know that every “transformational” idea eventually gets a logo, and long enough to tell within two minutes of a professional learning session whether this is going to be useful or whether someone is about to read us a slideshow.

It is also long enough to have become a little less interested in certainty.

I do not feel like I have education figured out. In fact, in some ways, I probably feel less certain than I did fifteen years ago. But thirty years does clarify a few things. It gives you a stronger sense of what matters, what lasts, and what is mostly noise.

So, at the end of year 30, here are 30 things I believe about education.

  1. Relationships are not one more thing. They are the thing. Not in a sentimental poster-on-the-wall way. In a practical, daily, deeply human way. Students learn better when they feel known. Staff thrive more when they feel trusted. Culture moves when relationships are strong.
  2. Great schools are built in small moments, not big announcements. The tone of the front office. The way a principal responds when someone makes a mistake. The way a teacher greets a student who is having a rough day. That is culture.
  3. The best educators I know combine high standards with deep humanity. They do not confuse kindness with low expectations. They push kids, but they do it from a place of belief and hope.
  4. Kids need adults who can see past the current version of them. Some students are easy to believe in. The real work is believing in the ones who are harder to read, harder to reach, or harder to teach in the moment.
  5. Joy matters more than we sometimes admit. Not because school should be entertainment, but because joy is often a signal that people feel safe, connected and engaged. Joy is not fluff. It is fuel.
  6. A school can be academically strong and still miss something essential if students do not feel like they belong. Belonging is not an add-on. It is not a committee. It is not a month on the calendar. It is a condition for learning.
  7. For all the talk about systems, structures, and technology, teachers still make the biggest difference. The person in the room with students every day still matters most.
  8. The profession is harder than many people realize and more beautiful than many people remember. Both things are true.
  9. We should be careful not to confuse activity with improvement. Education is very good at launching things. New plans. New frameworks. New dashboards. New acronyms. Actual improvement is quieter and slower than that.
  10. Trust is the real accelerant in schools. Not pressure. Not compliance. Not another initiative.
  11. Fifty dollars of pizza at a meeting has generated more genuine goodwill than some professional development days I have spent months planning. 
  12. Leadership is less about having the answer and more about creating the conditions where better answers can emerge. The older I get, the less impressed I am by leaders who always have a take and the more impressed I am by those who can build clarity, courage and coherence in others.
  13. The best schools feel alive. There is energy in the hallways. There is laughter somewhere. There is evidence that adults and students are doing more than surviving the day.
  14. Students are paying attention to far more than our lessons. They are watching how adults disagree. How power is used. How people are treated. What gets celebrated. What gets ignored. School teaches through atmosphere as much as instruction.
  15. Public education is still one of the most hopeful things we do together. Imperfect, complicated, sometimes frustrating, absolutely. But hopeful too. A daily act of collective belief in young people and in the future.
  16. We need to get better at protecting the energy of educators. Burned-out adults cannot build thriving schools. We cannot live in a world where everything is urgent all the time.
  17. There are things that matter deeply in schools that will never fit neatly on a spreadsheet. Confidence. Courage. Identity. Friendship. Curiosity. The feeling a student gets when they finally think, maybe I am good at this.
  18. The extracurricular life of a school is not extra. Athletics. Music. Drama. Clubs. Leadership. Service. Trips. Performances. For some students, that is where their school becomes a place they love.
  19. Most school improvement is cultural before it is technical. You can import a new program. You cannot import trust. You cannot mandate generosity. You cannot spreadsheet your way into belonging.
  20. The future is going to demand more of our students than obedience. They will need judgment. Adaptability. Discernment. Creativity. Courage. The ability to work with others. The ability to make sense of complexity.
  21. AI is not reducing the need for human judgment in schools. It is raising the premium on it. After spending this past year immersed in AI integration work alongside teachers, administrators, and students, I am more convinced than ever that the technology does not make human wisdom less important. It makes it more important. The question is not whether to engage. It is how to engage well.
  22. We should be helping students ask better questions, not just produce better answers. In a world where information is abundant and intelligence is increasingly accessible, the quality of our questions matters more than ever.
  23. Children need challenge, but they also need hope. They need to believe that effort leads somewhere, that adults are on their side, and that the future is not already closed off to them.
  24. Schools should help young people become more fully themselves, not just more employable. Career readiness matters. So does character. So does citizenship. So does helping students figure out who they are and how they want to live.
  25. I believe in innovation, but I believe even more in steadiness. In a profession that is constantly being asked to change, there is something powerful about adults who are consistent, thoughtful, calm, and grounded. Steadiness is underrated. It is also, quietly, a strategy.
  26. The adults in a school deserve the same things we say students deserve. Clarity. Belonging. Growth. Encouragement. Grace. A sense that someone notices their effort.
  27. Some of the best work in education never gets tweeted, branded, or turned into a conference session. It happens quietly. A teacher staying after to help. A custodian who knows every kid’s name. A counsellor making space for a student who has nowhere else to go.
  28. Schools are still one of the few places left where different people are asked to live, learn and grow together. This matters. Especially now.
  29. I still believe this work is worth doing with energy, imagination, and yes, hope. Not because it is easy. Not because schools are perfect. But because what happens in them still matters immensely.
  30. One of the clearest signs that this work matters is when a former student comes back years later just to say thank you. After thirty years, I have been to a lot of end-of-year events, sat through a lot of budget meetings, and attended more retirement parties than I can count. And yet nothing has prepared me for how much that moment still lands every single time. It never gets old. If you are looking for evidence that this work matters, that is probably the best place to start.

Thirty years in, I find myself less interested in silver bullets and more interested in substance. Less drawn to certainty and more drawn to people who can hold complexity without losing heart. Less impressed by urgency for urgency’s sake and more appreciative of those who help schools become places where both adults and students can do their best work.

Education has changed a lot since I began. So have I.

But the longer I do this work, the more I believe that the heart of it has not changed nearly as much as people think. Young people still need adults who care. Schools still need cultures built on trust. Learning still depends on relationships. And hope, despite everything, is still a pretty good strategy.

Maybe that is what thirty years gives you. Not all the answers. Just a little more clarity about what is worth holding onto.

Here’s to year 30 and the work still ahead.

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers as I edited and refined my thinking.

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Going Home to Riverside

Posted in Change, tagged , , , , , , on June 15, 2026| 14 Comments »

Some chapters in a career close the way they should, with time to say goodbye properly, to thank the people who made the work meaningful, and to mark the ending before the next beginning.

And some chapters close faster than you would like.

When I was hired as Assistant Superintendent of West Vancouver Schools in 2007, the timing meant a rushed departure from Riverside Secondary in Port Coquitlam, where I had spent five of my six years in the Coquitlam School District, first as VP and then as principal. There was a goodbye, but not the one I would have chosen. Not enough time to properly say what I wanted to say to the staff, students, and families who had given me so much.

This week, nineteen years later, I was inducted into the Riverside Wall of Excellence, a recognition for past staff and students who have made contributions to the school and community. I was asked to speak at the ceremony in the school theatre.

I did not think of it as an award night. I thought of it as a chance to finally close the loop. Nineteen years later, I finally got to.

Here is what I said (at the bottom of the post is the video of the speech):

“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.”

That quote from The Office has stayed with me for years, because the truth is, most of us only realize how special a time was after it has passed.

And for me, Riverside Secondary became one of those places.

To be standing here tonight is honestly emotional, because Riverside was never just a school to me. It was a community that shaped who I became as a leader, as a person, and as someone who still deeply believes in the power of public education.

When I arrived at Riverside as a 27 year old vice principal, I was young enough that some people probably wondered if I was lost and looking for Mr. Lepore’s Social Studies 11 class. And the funny thing is, Mr. Lepore was teaching here then and is still teaching here now.

In fact, at one of my very first staff meetings, a teacher asked how old I was. When I said “27,” she looked at me and said, “I have underwear older than you.”

And honestly… Riverside always kept it real.

But what mattered most was this: people could have watched me struggle. They could have sat back and thought, “Well, let’s see if this kid can figure it out.”

But that is not what Riverside did.

The staff here did everything they could to help me succeed. They supported me, challenged me, guided me, laughed with me, and occasionally rescued me from situations I probably created myself.

This school was still young and still figuring out who it wanted to be. But there was this incredible energy here. Riverside embraced innovation, technology, school spirit, and excellence before those things became buzzwords. There were championship athletic teams, extraordinary arts performances, and every once in a while I would nervously pick up the latest edition of The Eddy to see what students were saying about us. Sometimes it was insightful. Sometimes it was brutally honest. Usually both.

People cared deeply about building something special together. And they did.

Now… I should also say that not every Riverside memory was inspirational.

Some of you may have heard stories of the Halloween assembly streaker incident. For those who haven’t, buckle up.

One year, during an October 31st school assembly, a streaker appeared and ran through the gym. And without really thinking this through, I chased him all the way out to Gates Park while dressed in a full Riddler costume.

To this day, I honestly do not know which one of us looked more alarming to the public.

But in many ways, that story captures Riverside perfectly. This was a school full of energy, unpredictability, joy, and people willing to jump in and help each other no matter what happened.

What Riverside taught me most was something bigger. It taught me how extraordinary public education really is.

Every single day, 1200 students and 100 staff members, supported by families who trusted this school with the thing they love most in the world, came together to create opportunity, belonging, care, and hope. To the parents in this room: that trust you place in schools like Riverside matters more than you know, and the staff here have always been worthy of it.

That is not ordinary. And sometimes I worry we forget how remarkable that actually is.

Nineteen years later, I still think about Riverside almost daily. The lessons I learned here still guide me as Superintendent in West Vancouver. And if I am being completely honest, even after all these years and all the schools I have worked with, Riverside still feels like home.

I was surrounded by so many wonderful people I learned from during my time here. There are far too many to name, but I want to acknowledge the admin partners who shaped both this school and me like: Bryan Evans, Michael Grice, Mary O’Neil, and Todd Clerkson. Their friendship and leadership meant everything.

So to the students sitting here tonight: I hope you understand something earlier than most of us do.

These might actually be the good old days.

Not because everything is perfect. Not because every moment is easy. But because you are surrounded by people building community together.

One day, years from now, you will remember teachers who believed in you, friends who carried you through hard times, and ordinary moments in hallways that somehow became unforgettable.

Trust me. Even the weird assembly stories stay with you.

Thank you to Riverside for shaping my life in ways I could never have understood at 27 years old. And thank you for this incredible honour.

The longer I work in education, the more convinced I become that schools are remembered less for their buildings and programs than for the people who fill them.

Walking back into Riverside reminded me that most of what matters in a career is not what you did but who you did it alongside. I was lucky to land in that community when I did, and luckier still to finally get the chance to say so properly.

Some chapters close faster than you would like. This one finally closed the way it should have.

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My Words to the Class of 2026

Posted in Change, SD45, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2026| Leave a Comment »




At the start of this year, I chose a word for 2026: ALIVE

It was a word I picked because it felt like both a reminder and an aspiration.

Stay present. Stay curious. Stay connected to what actually matters.

I did not know then that it would become the word I kept returning to as graduation season arrived.

This spring, I had the chance to speak to graduates at both Rockridge Secondary and West Vancouver Secondary. The speeches were different, because each school and each graduating class is different, but they circled around some of the same ideas: presence, community, possibility, and the importance of staying connected to a real and meaningful life in a world that can pull us toward distraction.

The Rockridge speech (linked here) found its own word: Harmony. A different class, a different idea, but the same underlying hope.

One note on grad speeches. I have a running joke that if anyone remembers what the superintendent said the day after a speech, it probably went horribly wrong. The goal is to be forgotten gracefully.

Still, each year, I try to say something worth saying.


Below are my words to the West Vancouver Secondary Class of 2026.


Staff, proud parents, family members, friends, and most importantly, the West Vancouver Secondary graduating class of 2026.

Before I speak directly to the graduates, I want to offer a brief but heartfelt thank you.

To the parents and families here tonight, thank you for choosing public education, and for trusting this school and this district with your children. And to the staff of West Vancouver Secondary, thank you for supporting, challenging, encouraging, and caring for these students. Graduation is a student achievement, but it is also a community achievement.

Graduates, I want to start with one word.

Alive.

That is the word that keeps coming to mind when I hear Mr. Rauh and others talk about this class.

You are complex, in the best possible way. You bring a wide range of interests, passions, backgrounds, talents, and stories. But you are also something that matters deeply. Again and again, the adults around you describe you as kind, thoughtful, warm, and welcoming. The kind of people who make a school feel better simply by being part of it.

This is a class that showed up.

In athletics, including a senior boys basketball team that won the North Shore. In academics, including a fifth place finish out of 87 schools at the UBC Physics Olympics. In the arts, in music, theatre, Rock Band, and productions like Not Another Murder Podcast.

And sometimes, maybe most impressively, you showed up when you did not have to. You did the work and honoured the responsibility in front of you.

That says something about you.

It says you understand that community is not just built in the big moments. It is built in daily choices. The way you treat new staff. The way you welcome others. The way you keep showing up.

That is a class that is alive.

In a world that is increasingly digital, increasingly mediated, increasingly filtered through a screen, the most radical thing you can do is stay fully, stubbornly alive.

Present. Curious. Connected to real people, real places, and real conversations.

Your education has given you more than content. It has given you the capacity to think, to feel, to question, and to care. It has taught you that learning is not just about preparing for some distant future. It is about becoming more fully yourself, right now.

There will be moments ahead when the path is not clear. Times when it feels easier to stand back, scroll past, or wait until you are completely ready.

But very few meaningful things begin with feeling completely ready.

So say yes.

Say yes to learning something new. Say yes to people who expand your world. Say yes to hard conversations, generous friendships, and work that matters enough to challenge you.

And say yes to being fully alive in the life that is in front of you.

West Vancouver Secondary, Class of 2026, you have been a gift to this school and to this community.

Now go be that gift to the world.

Congratulations.

After the ceremony, a parent sent me a photo from the room. In the foreground were three students, phones out, mid scroll, while I was speaking.

I choose to believe they were posting live updates of their enthusiasm.

And honestly, that feels about right. Graduation is full of big words, proud adults, formal rituals, and young people already beginning to look toward whatever comes next.

That is as it should be.

Congratulations, Class of 2026.

Stay present. Stay curious. Stay connected.

Go be the gift.

 

If you are curious, here is a link to last year’s grad speeches as well.

 

 

The image at the top of this post was generated through AI.  Various AI tools were used to do some light editing before publication.

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Forty Years and Still Connected

Posted in Change, tagged , , , , on June 1, 2026| 4 Comments »

Daniel Woodward Elementary School is just across a field from the house I grew up in. Last Saturday, forty years after leaving Grade 7, I walked back in.

We were there for a reunion of the Grade 7 class of 1986. Walking the halls of your elementary school as an adult is a strange and wonderful thing. So much was unchanged. The same corridors. The same feel. A time machine.

We made our way to the gym, the Taylor Coliseum, and there it was: the plaque, still on the wall, just as it had been. The gym is named after Mr. Taylor, our Grade 7 teacher, and there is no one who deserves it more. And he was there last Saturday, as were two other teaching legends, Mr. Nakanishi and Mr. Whitehead, our Grade 5 and Grade 6 teachers.

I wrote about each of them years ago, about the teachers who shaped me at Woodward and about what Mr. Taylor meant to all of us. Seeing the three of them together, still clearly friends, still clearly delighting in each other’s company, was one of the great gifts of the day. What they had was real. We could tell it then, and we could see it plainly now.

People might raise an eyebrow at the idea of an elementary school reunion. I get it. High school reunions are the norm, the cultural touchstone. But elementary school deserves its moment too.

Woodward was not a large school, and most of us spent eight years there without changing schools or moving houses. We were in each other’s classes, in each other’s backyards, in each other’s lives, year after year. There were 38 kids in our Grade 7 class alone. Maybe the good old days were not always that good for teachers. But the community was real, and it held.

What was striking about a 40-year reunion, as opposed to a 10 or even 20-year one, is what people stop performing. At the early reunions, the unspoken question is often who got ahead, who made it, who is winning. By forty years, that game is over and no one seems to miss it. People have lived real lives. Nothing has been linear. People have loved and lost and built things and rebuilt themselves and found their way through. The conversations last Saturday had the ease that comes only when people have stopped pretending life is a straight line.

We grew up in a particular time and place, and last Saturday we remembered it together. The clichés about childhood in the 1980s are all true. We went to each other’s houses. We played outside until it was dark. We rode bikes, played road hockey, drank water from the hose. We had a student radio show, Bugle Radio on CISL 650. A few years earlier, our Woodward choir had sung for the Queen at the opening of BC Place. Shellmont Plaza near the school had everything we needed: Safeway, the bowling lanes, the video store, Shirley’s Bakery.

We were twelve and thirteen years old in 1986, the year of Expo 86 and Top Gun and the Hand of God. The stories people told were about each other’s parents, especially the moms, who were neighbourhood moms in the truest sense. Moms to all of us, not just their own kids.

That kind of community is not nothing. It leaves a mark.

There is a lot of conversation right now about what children are missing: independence, unstructured time, the freedom to just go. Last Saturday was a small reminder of what that freedom helped shape: people who know how to be with each other, who can walk into a room after forty years and pick up a conversation as though no time has passed at all.

That ease is the thing I keep coming back to. Face to face. No agenda. No performance. Just people who share something that cannot be replicated or transferred or downloaded. A shared past. A shared place. A shared teacher whose name is still on the gym wall.

This was not just a point in time. It was a reconnection.

Many of us will stay in touch. As you get older, you understand more clearly that your life is the people in it. Last Saturday was a good reminder of how many good people were there from the very beginning.

 

 

 

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