A Discussion with Lynn MacDonell, Elementary School Principal, Manitoulin Island, Ontario

With: Lynn MacDonell Berkley Center Profile

June 15, 2015

Background: As part of the Education and Social Justice Fellowship, in June 2015 student Caitlin Snell interviewed Lynn MacDonell, an elementary school principal working near Manitoulin Island in Ontario, Canada. In this interview MacDonell discusses the advantages of working in a tight-knit community and the challenge of generational differences between parents and children in education.
How long have you lived in this area?

So, I don't actually live in this community. I live about 45 minutes east of here, but I've been an administrator in this general area for eight years.

What do you enjoy most about your community?

I think the best thing about being in this, it could be defined as an urban setting, ‘cause it is in a town of a mill and hospital, so it's kind of got an urban setting to it, but it's a small town, so parents do tend to be quite involved. If we're doing a special activity, it's easy for me to pick up the phone and very informally say that we need some help with something on any given day, and parents are usually fairly quick to volunteer time. Our parents, actually, if they know the date ahead of time, will arrange work schedules around special school activities. We do an annual Fall Harvest Feast, and our parents are asking for that date in June so they can arrange work schedules, and we usually have about 25 to 30 parents out helping us with that. I worked in schools twice this size and had half as many parent volunteers.

I think for me that community piece…in a smaller town the school really does become the hub of the community, so not only do school functions happen here, but also community functions happen here. Our school is what they call a “priority school,” which means the Ministry of Education of Ontario provides our board with additional funds to allow our school to be used at little or no cost by the community, so I would say three or four nights a week we have different user groups, whether it's soccer, dog training, or "Our Children, Our Future," volleyball comes in, just all different kinds of things so that our school is really a living breathing part of the community, and I don't know that that necessarily happens where the school is situated in a bigger area where there's more facilities for the community to access. So it's kind of a vibrant part of the community. That's what I like most about being here.

What are some areas of improvement for your community?


I think again it is a bit of a double-edged sword: we have a fairly high number of folks in our community who have not completed high school, and I think that's primarily because for most of them school was not a positive experience. So those parents come to school, and they bring that sense of failure or sense of school not being a positive or safe place when they arrive at school with their 4-year-olds to register them, and so you have to work really hard with those parents to assure them that things have changed. Things have changed a lot since I was in high school; things have changed a lot since my 25-year-old was in high school. So, it's to work with those parents to help them understand that things do change, and they get better over time. But we all bring with us the baggage that we have right from our own experiences, so I think it's working with our community where we do, as I say, have, I think, a higher-than-average percentage of parents who had an unsuccessful experience in school, where you can't leave it behind you, but you work through it, build trust.

How does your school work to combat these challenges?


I think the biggest thing that I did here when I moved here five years ago was open up, really open up lines of communication. It was a lot about calling parents with anything that happened good or bad, calling parents with as many good news calls as I could, sending home regular newsletters, etc.    
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