The new Superintendent of School District No. 73 (Kamloops/Thompson) will be Alison Sidow, who was Director of Instruction, Acting Superintendent, and then Superintendent of School District No. 74 (Gold Trail) from 2006 to 2011. Sidow, who has been an Assistant Superintendent in SD 73 since 2012, will take over on August 1 from retiring Superintendent Karl deBruijn.
“It’s a really exciting time to be leading a district,” says Sidow of her new appointment. “All the major reconfiguration has been done, enrolment is steady, and there’s a newly redesigned curriculum. I can really focus on teaching and learning. As an educator it plays to my strengths.”
She says she has so many good things to remember from her time in Gold Trail. “I’ll probably never be as engaged in my work as when I was in SD 74.” One of her main focuses was on increasing completion rates, and she says that when she looks at the District’s current completion rate she’s thrilled to think that she played a small part in that. The SD 74 completion rate—which measures the proportion of students who graduate with a BC Certificate of Graduation or an Adult Graduation Diploma within six years of entering grade 8—was 81.2 per cent for the 2014/15 school year, up 22.1 per cent from five years earlier.
“I look on my time in SD 74 with great fondness,” says Sidow. “The people I met and worked with, and the experiences I had there, shaped me and showed me the value of teamwork; how people working together can achieve great things.”