School's dismissed for Mrs. Gordon

Wednesday's Daily News featured a farewell to a long time Prince Rupert educator, as Westview Principal Janet Gordon bids farewell to School District 52 on Friday.

The paper provided a review of her career, tracing her many achievements through the years, from student, to teacher to administrator.

The Gordon's are off to retirement on Vancouver Island, leaving behind a grateful but rather sad group of educators who will miss her leadership in the local education system.

School's out for veteran educator
By Kris Schumacher
The Daily News
Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Pages one and three

If there was ever a poster-girl for the successes of the Prince Rupert School District, it could well be Janet Gordon's vibrantly smiling face.

After a lifetime spent in District 52 schools, whether as a student, teacher, or in the role of principal, Gordon will finally be saying farewell to the city she has grown to love so much on her final day in school this Friday.

Now, ready for the life of a retiree, Gordon and her husband Larry will be moving down south, where they can be closer to their two children, and even closer to a Parksville golf course.
It's fitting that Gordon will retire from L'ecole Westview Elementary, since it was that same school in which she began her teaching career in a Grade 3 classroom.

She also taught at Roosevelt and King Ed, before becoming vice-principal of King Ed, then moving on to be principal at Seal Cove for seven years, and finishing her career with eight years as principal of Westview.

"I'm fresh still for teaching, so when people said it was time to retire I wasn't quite ready yet," said Gordon. "I pretty much love my job, and I really hate to leave it. I've loved teaching and I've loved being a principal."

One Gordon's fondest jobs in her educator timeline was in 1986 when she truly pioneered the introduction of computers into the school curriculum. While at Roosevelt, she persuaded her principal to purchase a clone of an early Apple computer. It would be one of the first computers in a Prince Rupert school.

Gordon would show kids how to write basic one-line programs, the earliest of which enabled the computer to count to one million.

"We would announce over the loudspeaker that we were now up to 490,000 or whatever number, because it took a long, long time to count," she said. "But that was bringing computers into the school, so when the school board office heard about me doing this stuff, they thought maybe they should get computers into schools."

The school board officially made her the computer-helper teacher for the district, and she became one of only five females in British Columbia in that role.

"There were about 70 men, mostly high school physics teachers, and we all met in Victoria a couple times a year and started deciding how computers would go in schools," said Gordon. "The first big project was to buy a lab of 15 Apple 2 computers, and a moving van would come to move them around schools month to month."

In addition to helping lead the digital revolution in Prince Rupert elementary classrooms, Gordon has been involved in many projects during her career, many of which are still in place today. She started the Seal Cove Thanksgiving turkey lunch, after borrowing the idea from a substitute teacher at King Ed.

"I remember that first year we did the feast for the whole school, we had all the kids cooking things in various places, and we blew all the fuses because we had so many electrical things going," Gordon remembers with a laugh. "So then we were cooking peas and corn in electric frying pans out in the hall. But that was one of the most wonderful things we could have done at that school, so it's not always about the ABCs."

While teaching at King Edward Elementary, Gordon was involved in starting the Math Counts program, which had students collecting pennies to discover what a million really looks like.
"We had a big shiny red bathtub, and we got up to hundreds and hundreds of thousands, by the time I left it was at around 500,000," she said. "We were trying to teach a lot of math out of it, but we ended up having to empty out the bathtub every once in a while because it was buckling the floor."

Whether it was helping students to win two new IBM computers and for King Ed, applying for inner-city school funding that brought an extra $100,000 a year into District 52, or initiating Study Centres in elementary schools, Gordon has either spearheaded or taken part in too many programs and projects to list. Even though Gordon says it's going to be difficult to leave school life and Prince Rupert behind, it may well be the community of Prince Rupert that has real trouble saying goodbye to her.

"I think the district is going to lose a great principal and leader, and I'll be sad to see her go," said Cecilia Armstrong, who has worked with Gordon since 1993 at Seal Cove. "She's made a big difference in a lot of kids' lives, and started huge initiatives like the lunch program at Seal Cove, or just here at Westview with improving the morale. She really leads by example, and I know the staff is sad to see her go."

Preparing for her final day at school this Friday, and busy packing everything up at home before her departure by ferry on Nov. 2, Gordon hasn't even had enough time to think about life without work.

"What am I going to do without these 250 kids every day to give me laughs and energy? It's a worthwhile job being a teacher in the first place, but I have a lot of kids here that I care about," she said with lament in her voice.

"I'm leaving with such mixed feelings because I've really had such a great time."