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After 47 years, Eggerer still loves education

When you’ve been in education as long as Sylvia Eggerer, you learn a thing or two. She is currently one of two Airdrie trustees alongside Don Thomas, and had a hand in educating youth in Manitoba and Alberta since 1964.
Sylvia Eggerer has been in the education system for nearly 50 years and currently serves as a trustee for Rocky View Schools.
Sylvia Eggerer has been in the education system for nearly 50 years and currently serves as a trustee for Rocky View Schools.

When you’ve been in education as long as Sylvia Eggerer, you learn a thing or two.

She is currently one of two Airdrie trustees alongside Don Thomas, and had a hand in educating youth in Manitoba and Alberta since 1964.

At 17, Eggerer enrolled in teacher’s college in Winnipeg and, at 18, she was instructing.

“That was in a time where there was a real shortage of teachers,” said Eggerer, who taught for Winnipeg No. 1 school division. “To get a job with the largest school division (in Winnipeg) was good.”

She never stopped teaching even when she decided to go back to school and earn two different degrees.

“It took me 10 years to get my degrees,” said Eggerer proudly, who also managed to raise a family. “All of this was done in summer school and night school.”

By 1980, her career called her west from The Pas, Manitoba, and Eggerer and family moved to Airdrie. She started at was once Airdrie Elementary Junior High School and eventually found a home at George McDougall High School where she worked as a teacher and administrator for more than 20 years, retiring in 2006.

Over the years, she remembers many ideas that came and went in the education system, including the open area concept during the mid 1970s.

“The whole purpose was to allow people to see each other working and create more of an open atmosphere,” she said. “It was to allow people to work off each other as opposed to being stuck in a rut.”

The idea fizzled out after about 15 years and teachers began to put up walls again, but Eggerer called the idea “an attempt to change the system,” a reason she enjoys the current learning model with Rocky View Schools.

“We’re finding in-roads into the way kids learn,” she said. “We’re able to engage them through today’s technology.”

“If you are really interested in something that’s happening and going on, it’s like, ‘wow, this is really exciting.’ But if it’s somebody at the front going ‘yada yada yada,’ it’s easy to lose people.”

Engaging children through technology is a further inroad to a child’s development, but also for staying up to date, she said.

“If you stop and you think where we’ve come in 65 years, it’s absolutely amazing that we would have the ability to know what’s happening in Egypt or Libya a moment’s notice.”

While she isn’t convinced digital learning is the answer to all of education’s challenges, she feels, if used correctly, it can certainly aid in learning.

“Is technology the be-all and end-all? No. It’s just something else, like getting a good pencil. Can it help? Of course it can help.”

Eggerer also enjoys parent involvement, something she wants to see increased.

“We need to break down the barriers of the old fashioned way where parents never came to school,” she said. “Now, we’re looking for community engagement and community support.”

Eggerer said it’s the school board’s innovative thinking that has kept her on as a trustee for five years, including a term as board chair, and she still has work to do before bowing out.

“I have a mission,” she said. “We need schools and we’re going to have to redo boundaries and where kids go to what schools in Airdrie. That’s going to be a fairly big upheaval and I want to see that done right.”


Airdrie Today Staff

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