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St. Mary School principal moving on

St. Mary School principal Sheila Glebe knows her last day at the school will be filled with mixed emotions. After five years as head of the school, Glebe is joining the ranks at St. Albert’s École Secondaire Ste.
Sheila Glebe will be leaving St. Mary School at the end of the month to become principal of école Secondaire Ste. Marguerite d’Youville in St. Al-bert.
Sheila Glebe will be leaving St. Mary School at the end of the month to become principal of école Secondaire Ste. Marguerite d’Youville in St. Al-bert.

St. Mary School principal Sheila Glebe knows her last day at the school will be filled with mixed emotions.

After five years as head of the school, Glebe is joining the ranks at St. Albert’s École Secondaire Ste. Marguerite d’Youville (ESSMY) as principal.

It will be a tough goodbye for her as her roots run deep at St. Mary. Glebe graduated high school and both her children attended the catholic school. Her parents also worked there back in the day — her dad as a teacher, mom as a librarian — and now her sister.

“It’s a school pretty dear to my heart,” she said. “I’m leaving with very mixed feelings, but like I said, I do enjoy a challenge and moving forward.”

The move to St. Albert will bring her closer to her son and grandchildren, but the Grade 7-12 French immersion school will admittedly be a challenge for the principal who doesn’t speak the language.

“I’ll have to work on my French for a start,” she said, “but it’s the type of situation where the first thing that needs to happen when moving into a new school is, first and foremost, you need to meet people.”

That will involve meeting one-on-one with staff in late June with questions in hand, the same process she went through at St. Mary.

“I need to get to know the people of ESSMY and the students, staff and learn what their hopes and desires are for their school, what they see is needed moving forward, what are the important traditions that need to remain. That’s critical.”

Glebe is juggling both positions until the end of the school year and will officially take over at ESSMY in July.

St. Mary assistant principal Vance Nakonechny will move up the ladder to replace Glebe in the coming school year.

Second career

“Anytime you work in a school, it’s the team work that’s critical to having success,” she said.

Glebe has been in education for 20 years, though it turned out to be her second career.

Her first was in journalism working in radio and television. Glebe worked a few years in Saskatchewan before rounding her way back to Westlock at the radio station and then as editor of the Westlock News.

While covering Evergreen Catholic and Pembina Hills school board meetings, she developed an intense interest in education. So with two kids in tow, she eventually made the leap and went back to university.

“I wrote about education all the time and realized there was more to it than I initially believed, the possibilities for working with people doing good works,” she said.

In 1997, she returned to St. Mary as an elementary teacher before migrating to junior high where she developed the school’s Career and Technology Studies (CTS) program, thanks to her background in technology and desktop computers as a journalist.

Eventually she moved on to St. Marguerite in Spruce Grove. A year later, she joined Holy Spirit, a brand new school in Devon, as assistant principal in 2005. About seven years later, a spot opened up at St. Mary and she took the opportunity to move back home.

“And run a school, which I dearly wanted to do,” she added.

New approaches

One of her greatest accomplishments at the school was the introduction of a new Early Childhood Services (ECS) program. The Reggio Emilia approach is a play-based, developmentally appropriate program for kindergarten students and children as young as three and a half in the Pre-K program.

“That approach shows dramatic results for increases in students and their ability to communicate, and their speech and language and all of the sort of pre-language and numeracy skills,” she noted.

The approach also brings about more interaction with other students, and gives them access to speech language therapists, behavioural psychologists and occupational therapists.

When she first came to the school, Glebe pitched the program to Evergreen Catholic Schools’ board of trustees and St. Mary became the first in the division to implement it. Now the program is in place at all schools in the division.

“That was very much a group effort,” she said. “The accomplishments in a school are not done by one person; it took a whole team, a team approach,” she noted, both from within and beyond the school.

“We even had people outside our immediate school community helping plan this program. A tremendous group effort went into the creation of this program and it continues to be very, very successful.”

Also in her first year, Glebe spearheaded the creation of two new positions: the special education co-ordinator and school counsellor position, and a learning coach.

The job of the learning coach is to work with new and seasoned teachers to help them implement new strategies for their professional growth, to co-ordinate project-based learning throughout the school, and to help teachers improve their classrooms.

The special education co-ordinator and school counsellor is available on site five days a week to work with high-needs students, both academic high needs and social and emotional high needs.

“Those I think are tremendous leaps forward in education,” Glebe said. “We’re not by any means the only school to implement that type of program. It’s something all of Evergreen has implemented.”

At the junior-high level, she introduced new programming and new options such as robotics, outdoor education, and this year revitalized the Grade 6 camp program.

Lastly, though it wasn’t a personal accomplishment, she spoke of the work done by the St. Mary School Fundraising Committee and Parent Advisory Council for the school’s brand new playground.

“Those people have done an unbelievable amount of work in fundraising, in investigating, researching the best kind of playground to put in — it goes way beyond being a playground,” she said. “They’ve put in a gazebo that will be wheelchair accessible, particularly for our seniors on this side of town, many of whom are in wheelchairs out of the long-term care centre. It’s just going to be a real treasure for the whole town.”

Of course, the experience at St. Mary wouldn’t have been as successful as it was without the students.

“It’s such a strong sense of community,” she said. “The kids here were so good; just the best. These kids are really involved in social justice activities … It’s a tremendous outpouring of caring from the students toward each other and I think that speaks volumes of the types of kids that attend St. Mary School.”

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