I love the first day of school. No matter how long you have been doing this work, there is something about this day that still feels like a beginning.
For the last couple of weeks, our schools have been slowly coming back to life. Leadership teams gathered. Staff returned. Classrooms were organized. Schedules were adjusted. Meetings happened. Plans were made. Last Thursday, we brought everyone in West Vancouver Schools together for our annual Opening Day. And today, the people all of that work is actually for walk through our doors.
The students.
A Kindergarten student is walking into school for the first time. A Grade 8 student is trying to figure out where they fit. A Grade 12 student is beginning their final year with us. Some students have been counting the days until they could see their friends again. Others arrived this morning quietly anxious. That is the work underneath all of the work.
Over the last couple of weeks, I have had several opportunities to talk with people across our district about the year ahead. The audiences have changed and the conversations have ranged from artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing to literacy, physical literacy, belonging and wellbeing. But I have found myself circling around the same question:
Where are we going?
I still believe that if we are about everything, we are about nothing. That does not mean schools should only care about three things. We run complicated organizations serving wonderfully complicated human beings, and there will always be hundreds of things requiring our attention. But underneath all of them, I keep coming back to three commitments for the year ahead.
Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All.
Increasingly, I do not see these as three separate priorities. I think they depend on each other. And as I think about the year ahead, I keep coming back to three questions. What should change? What must endure? And who gets to be part of it?
What should change?
I have a bit of a history at our Opening Day of finding profound educational wisdom in questionable places, usually involving television programs and movies from the 1980s. Over the years I have somehow managed to work Three’s Company, Newhart and Mr. Belvedere into conversations about education. So after we lost Dolly Parton just before the start of the school year, it probably should not surprise anyone that I found myself rewatching 9 to 5.
For those who have somehow missed it over the last 45 years, Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin play three women fed up with a terrible boss who decide their workplace needs to change. Their particular strategy for dealing with management is not one I am recommending for West Vancouver Schools. But there is something surprisingly current in what happens next.
Once the women actually have the opportunity to change their workplace, they begin asking pretty basic questions. Why do we do things this way? Could we organize work differently? Could we create conditions where people actually do their best work? That is not a bad definition of innovation, and it is probably a more useful one than simply chasing whatever is newest.
In one of our leadership sessions before the school year started, we spent time talking about artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and quantum computing. I do not expect our educators to suddenly become quantum computing experts. We talked about these areas because they are windows into a world that is changing incredibly quickly, and our students are going to live and work in that world.
The temptation with something like AI is to define future readiness as knowing how to use the newest tools. Four years into the generative AI conversation, I am less interested in whether students are using AI and far more interested in whether they are thinking deeply about it.
The more important questions are about judgement. When should I use it? When should I not? What should I trust? What should I verify? What is this tool doing for me, and what thinking still belongs to me?
Those are not really technology questions. They are human questions. They are about curiosity, creativity, communication, critical thinking and judgement. They are about encountering something you do not understand and wanting to figure it out. They are about developing enough confidence in your own thinking that you can use powerful technologies without simply surrendering your thinking to them.
Technology changes. Those skills endure.
That is why I hope we think about innovation broadly this year. Innovation might be a new AI application or a completely new program. It might be finding a better way for a student to demonstrate what they know, reaching a learner who has not yet found their place, or changing the way we organize work so a colleague can thrive. And sometimes innovation is finally letting go of something we have done for years because nobody has stopped to ask why.
The question is not simply, what is new? It is, could there be a better way?
What must endure?
Of course, there is a tension here. The more willing we are to change, the clearer we also need to be about what must not be lost. In fact, I increasingly think the faster the world changes, the more our foundations matter.
There is no version of the future where literacy matters less, or numeracy matters less, or where relationships, perseverance, creativity, judgement and the ability to communicate with another human being become obsolete. And there is certainly no version where belonging does not matter.
This brings me back to Dolly Parton. For all the things she became famous for, the songs, the movies, the rhinestones and Dollywood, one of my favourite parts of her legacy has always been the Imagination Library. At its heart, it is an incredibly simple idea. Put books in the hands of children.
A woman who spent her entire career reinventing herself understood something wonderfully basic. Reading changes lives.
I love the tension in that. We can be relentlessly future facing and still recognize that sometimes the most transformative thing we can put in a child’s hands is a book.
Sometimes in education we create a false choice between innovation and the basics. Are we preparing students for the future, or are we focusing on literacy and numeracy? Are we embracing new technologies, or are we protecting human relationships? Are we creating new opportunities, or investing in the fundamentals?
My answer is yes.
We have to be exceptional at both. We should explore AI, cybersecurity, quantum computing and other forces shaping the world our students are entering. We should try things that do not work the first time. We should continue building on the same spirit that took robotics from an idea to something extraordinary in our district, that created Ignite Your Passions and our academy and district programs, and that took physical literacy from an emerging idea a decade ago to something deeply embedded across our schools today.
But none of that replaces the foundations. It builds on them. Foundations are built slowly. On purpose. Over years. They rarely make for the most dramatic announcement, but they are what allow everything else to happen.
Who gets to be part of it?
We use the phrase All Means All a lot in West Vancouver Schools. Like any phrase we use often, there is a danger that it becomes familiar enough that we stop really hearing it. Because All Means All is actually a very difficult commitment.
It means we do not judge an opportunity by whether we offered it. We ask who actually experienced it. We can build remarkable opportunities in AI, athletics, languages, the arts, STEM or anything else, but we still need to ask who sees themselves in those opportunities and who does not. We need to care deeply about the student performing at the very highest level and just as deeply about the student struggling to get through the door in the morning.
It means high expectations for every student, while recognizing that students may need different pathways to reach them. Some students need us to open a door. Some need us to get out of the way. Some need another opportunity. And some need an adult to quietly notice that something is wrong before they are ready to say so themselves.
It means Indigenous learner success is not somebody else’s work. It is our work. And it means safe and welcoming schools are not separate from excellence. They are a condition for it.
All Means All asks us to move past the question, Did we provide it? It asks, Who actually experienced it? Who is thriving? Who is not yet? And what are we prepared to do about it?
That is also why wellbeing belongs in this conversation. A student can be surrounded by extraordinary opportunities and still not be in a place to reach them. They can be sitting in the best lesson we have ever designed and find it almost impossible to learn if they do not feel safe, connected, known or well.
Wellbeing is not separate from learning. It is not the soft thing we get to after the important work is finished. It is one of the conditions that allows the important work to happen.
And the same is true for the adults who work in our schools. Schools only work because of the people in them. A teacher who notices something in a child. An education assistant who helps a student settle and return to class. An administrative assistant who makes a nervous family feel welcome. A custodian whose daily interactions tell students something about whether they belong. A principal who creates the conditions where people want to do their best work. Our facilities, IT, finance, human resources and district teams solving hundreds of problems that students will never know existed.
The student experience is the result of all of us.
There is a second meaning to All Means All. It means every student. And it takes all of us.
Twenty years in
This is my twentieth year in West Vancouver Schools. There are people I work with who have been here for all twenty of those years and some who have been here longer, and there are others beginning their first year with us today. I think there is something valuable in both. Experience should give us perspective without making us cynical. Newness should bring energy without assuming everything that came before needs to be replaced.
What I am proudest of over two decades is not that we have stayed the same. It is that we have stayed curious. Stability is not the enemy of innovation. Strong foundations do not prevent you from asking what could be next. In fact, they may be what give you the confidence to ask the question.
And that is what makes today so exciting. For the last couple of weeks, we have been able to talk about the year ahead in meeting rooms and theatres. We have talked about innovation and foundations and belonging and wellbeing and our commitment that all really does mean all. Today those ideas have names and faces.
The word I chose for this year is Alive. And today, this is what it looks like. There is a child learning to read. There is a student walking into a new school wondering whether they will find their people. There is someone discovering a sport, an instrument, an idea or a technology that may become part of who they are. There is a student who needs to be challenged more than they have ever been challenged before. And somewhere in one of our schools today there is a young person who needs an adult to notice them.
That is when the words matter. So as we begin another school year, I hope we remain genuinely curious about what should change and fiercely protective of what must endure. I hope we are ambitious about the future without becoming distracted by every new thing that arrives. And I hope we keep asking the uncomfortable question about every classroom, every program and every opportunity: Who is not experiencing success yet?
Innovation. Foundational Skills. All Means All. Not three competing priorities. Three parts of the same promise.
September always gives us another beginning.
Today, we get to make something of it.
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Various AI tools were used as feedback helpers as I edited and refined my thinking.
