Earlier this month, Hanover School Division superintendent Randy Dueck announced his plans to retire at the end of the current school year, bringing an end to a tenure that has lasted seven and a half years and seen tremendous growth and change.
Dueck’s career began 33 years ago at the Blumenort School, where he says he taught “everything.”
“I was primarily a Grade Seven homeroom teacher assigned social studies,” he says. “But yes, I taught everything, and I taught everything from Grade Five to Grade Nine in my time there.”
After seven years in Blumenort, Dueck took a leave of absence, picked up his family, and made a big move overseas—to Lithuania, where he worked for one year at Lithuania Christian College.
“In Lithuania I was teaching adult students, teaching them primarily speaking skills as an ESL teacher,” he says. “It was a fascinating experience, a transformative experience for myself and my family. There’s really nothing like that or comparable to that here in the Manitoba public school system.”
Coming home from Lithuania, Dueck returned to teach for one more year in Blumenort. But in 1996, he took his first leap into school administration, serving as principal at Steinbach Christian High School, a private school position he held for nine years.
Looking back, he says there wasn’t much difference between his private school and public school experiences.
“At Steinbach Christian High School, I think around that time we had 165 students, so it was a small school. In many ways, it was maybe not all that different in terms of how the school functioned as a Nine-to-Twelve school as Landmark Collegiate would have been. It was about the same size as Landmark Collegiate, teaching the same courses as Landmark Collegiate… but with a decidedly Christian perspective and teaching Bible courses and things like that as well.”
In 2005, he left Steinbach Christian High School and once again crossed the ocean to pick up some international experience. For one year, he worked at a well-regarded international baccalaureate school in India, serving as Vice Principal for Academic Affairs.
“I would say it was an elite private school,” he says, reflecting on that period in his life. “The school had been around for 105 years, so it was very well established and had a very positive profile in the country. That experience, while it still [involved] teaching and working with some of the same grades, there were a lot of difference with the kind of kids there and the [Indian school] curriculum that we taught.”
The next stage in Dueck’s career took him to Steinbach Junior High School, which has since been renamed Stonybrook Middle School. He occupied the role of vice principal there for a year.
One year later, in June 2007, he was promoted to assistant superintendent of the Hanover School Division.
On January 1, 2013 he began his tenure as superintendent.
Although the position of superintendent is highly administrative, Dueck says that he still sees himself primarily as a teacher and thinks in those terms. This comes across strongly in his thoughts on the highlights of his time as superintendent.
“I would say the number one highlight for me has been being able to work on the Deeper Learning Plan,” he says.
The Deeper Learning Plan began with a process by which students, teachers, principals, trustees, parents, and community members began meeting together to articulate answers to a fundamental question: what should students here in the Hanover School Division be learning? Dueck says that through this project they’ve worked to identify the skills, values, dispositions, and knowledge that are necessary for grads to be successful.
“We’ve had just a lot of input,” Dueck says. “We’ve talked about critical thinking and creativity, and being good citizens, and being of good character, and collaborating with one another. And that all came from a real grassroots perspective. It didn’t come from the top down. It came from out there in the field, from stakeholders, from the people interested in the education of our kids just saying, ‘This is what’s important to us’… We want students to be academically engaged. They’re doing the right work. But even more than that, we also want them to be intellectually engaged, so they’re actually thinking about the work they’re doing, and processing it, and growing their brains. And then our students mentioned to us that we need them to be emotionally engaged, because if they’re not emotionally engaged they’re not really learning… A big, big project!”
Dueck lists other major accomplishments during his terms, including the addition that was built at the Steinbach Regional Secondary School—and of course Niverville High School.
“That’s the one school that basically, from stem to stern, I’ve been the superintendent from concept to opening the doors. There’s the uniqueness of that project, where we’re working together with the town of Niverville and on developing a campus concept there with the Community Resource Centre. I think it’s a gem of a building, and the possibilities of what that campus will be like are amazing.”
Despite having accomplished so much, the division has also faced a series of controversies while on Dueck’s watch. Among them have been school lockdowns, threats that required the involvement of the RCMP, and very public battles regarding LGBTQ representation both in the curriculum and in the physical hallways and classrooms, in the form of Gay-Straight Alliances. Recently, a pair of high school students in Niverville went to the media after arguing that school staff shut down their planned protest against a local politician.
“You know, those are always difficult challenges,” Dueck reflects. “Out of a crisis situation, what we really hope for is a learning experience, that as a result of the crisis we have learned something and we’re better—we’ll be better the next time. And I think that is really true. We’ve had some of those in Niverville. We’ve come a long, long way from some of the first crises during my time here until now, where we have a solid divisional crisis team that gathers. These are people who know what to do. We know what we want to communicate. We have a very strong, detailed crisis plan and we do our best to keep the parents or whoever’s engaged or involved in the crisis in communication as much as is possible, so that people aren’t having to guess or, you know, imagine on social media what is actually going on or not.”
However, Dueck is careful not to get too far ahead of himself. Although he has announced his retirement, he still has another five months on the job. Over the course of the next few months, the division will be securing staff for the upcoming school year, a process which Dueck will oversee.
“The work I have ahead of me is to make sure there’s as great a staff as possible in place for September, and so again, obviously I want that to be as good as is possible. So I’ll be doing my best work there.”
And the board will be choosing Dueck’s replacement in the next little while. Dueck intends to do whatever he can to provide that replacement with whatever they need to be prepared to step into the role.
“I hope for nothing but the very best for Hanover School Division,” he says. “There may be some loose ends that I feel I need to wrap up during my time, so that when I do finally pass that torch or baton or whatever it is, I’m passing it on to somebody and saying, ‘Here you go. Here’s a division that’s in as great a shape as I can possibly leave it for you. All the best with it.’”