It is absolutely amazing how quickly the past few weeks have flown by. I made it successfully through the Isolation Hub, 14 days in an Ottawa hotel. I’ve been in Igloolik since August 3 and have been at the school everyday since then. As a school administrator we are required to be in the school for 5 days before the teachers and support staff come. This year is unique in Igloolik as the government of Nunavut and the Department of Education, and the local education authority have built a new high school. It’s a state of the art school and should be a source of pride and success for many years. What was left behind is the old high school building which is now the home to Sivuniit Middle School, my new school. We are a grade 6-9 school and we expect over 150 to attend this year.
I feel very lucky to be the Leader of the new middle school. Not only is it new, we don’t have a nickname, logo, colours, mission and vision statements. What we do have is a really interesting mix of teachers. There are 14 teachers. A number which includes an SST (special education) teacher, a learning coach (teacher to help teachers improve their professional practice), a Levelled Literacy Interventionist, a full-time principal and vp, and classroom generalist. Of that number 5 are experienced, the rest are fresh out of teacher college. Most of the teachers are from the Maritimes or Ontario, 2 are from Saskatoon and 1 is our local Inuktitut Language teacher.
Tomorrow we start regular classes in the Stage 1 of the Covid Pandemic. We don’t have any cases of cover in Nunavut yet and we’re hoping we don’t ever get any, but we’re taking precautions just in case. I feel very confident in our ability to deal with any crisis that presents itself.
Overall I’m adjusting well to this new life in the North. We are on an island just off the mainland of Canada and next to Baffin Island. Because of this, we get some supplies regularly by cargo plane, but the vast majority of supplies come once a year on the SeaLift. A cargo ship that brings containers with all the stuff you would need. We expect them in the next week or two. I can’t wait to see that in person as I’ve watched it on tv. A show called Arctic Haulers.
I’ve been taking a lot of pictures and I’ll put them up this weekend along with some descriptors.
Cheers for now!
Grandpa Guy 