Senior year is supposed to be a time for going out with friends, studying hard to get into your dream university or college and preparing yourself to say goodbye to teachers who have influenced your life over the past four years. For the class of 2021 though, it has been anything but that as they have found themselves in a constant back and forth from online learning to in school and barely any social outings. Here is a look at what a senior year in quarantine looked like to some of the grade 12 students of Drayton Valley and area.
Madison Prysko- Breton High School
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “I’m so accustomed to being able to see my family and all my friends. I’m a very social person so it’s very difficult to have to kind of reel that all back in and distance myself from my family which was the hardest.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “For online schooling I was okay. It was a bit of a struggle because we’ve always been very hands on learning with all of our teachers and it was very difficult between the teachers having to quarantine because of potential Covid cases and trying to figure everything out as it felt like in other years it was easier. This year was definitely harder and I do feel like most definitely I could have done better but with Covid it was extremely difficult.”
Q: Senior year usually involves tons of social events. How has Covid affected this?
A: “You see past years and they get to go out and party and celebrate amazing events in their life and we can’t this year.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “I am disappointed but I do know that my principal as well as my grad representative is doing the best they can with what we can do. I’m extremely disappointed but there really is not much we can do about it.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: “I’m hoping to take a gap year, kind of hoping for more vaccinations to be out and everything to kind of calm down Covid related before I do apply to school because I want the full education that I’m paying for with tuition and I wanna be able to be in classes learning. That’s the best way I learn instead of in a dorm room on my computer.”
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Rae-Lynne MacDuff– Holy Trinity Academy
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “The social aspect I think, you do a lot of it on your own and not as much with your friends helping you through it… We even do things like parties through school that we haven’t been able to do. We haven’t gotten to do a lot of the activities we are used to or our big trip to the Citadel we take every year.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “I personally haven’t seen a drop in my grades but being at home has forced me to work harder.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “I think we’ve put together a really fun event that’s just gonna celebrate the accomplishments we’ve achieved and we are happy with what we have I think.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A:“I’m going on to the University of Alberta to get a Bachelor of Elementary Education.”
Gwyneth Lizardo- Holy Trinity Academy
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “I think staying home and not seeing people for a long time. Not being able to see my friends and not being able to see my teachers that I was supposed to spend time with during my last year of school.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “I feel like Covid has not helped me at all. I learn better when I’m at school. Just trying to stay focused has been hard.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: “I’m going to the University of Alberta and taking a Bachelor of Arts and Economics.”
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
Symposium puts focus on mental health
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Shared history is a foundation for the future
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Working youth are suffering
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
Drayton to host U11 finals
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
Mathea Cruickshank- Holy Trinity Academy
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “It’s been hard building up self motivation, now you have to do stuff on your own and not have a support system there to help you out with schooling or any other aspects that you’d usually have in a regular year.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “I got relatively the same grades but definitely classes that I’m not as good at or passionate about my grades definitely dropped. I didn’t have the motivation to get stuff done.”
Q: Senior year usually involves tons of social events. How has Covid affected this?
A: “I feel like missing out on parties and just stuff like that. We didn’t get to create as strong of a class bond this year as other classes. Even just like sports teams and stuff we didn’t get to get together and have that type of fun.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “I almost kind of like this year better because they are making us feel really special and I know not a lot of graduates get to experience what we are experiencing so I’m thankful for what we have.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: “I’m going to Mount Royal University for a degree in social work.”
Rebekah Pequin- Holy Trinity Academy
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “Caring about school. It’s been difficult to have a positive attitude and the motivation to get the work done when you don’t have the encouragement from teachers and friends and not having a routine.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “It’s been a bit of a struggle but I’d say it’s more difficult to get the help. If you are struggling with something it’s harder to have the one on one that HTA normally has.”
Q: Senior year usually involves tons of social events. How has Covid affected this?
A: “I definitely missed out on sports. It was my last year to play basketball and to be the captain and all that. We didn’t get any of that this year. The tournaments are a big part of it but the bonding aspect also with your couches and with your teammates.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “I’m excited that it’s something different but it’s also disappointing that I saw both my older brothers’ grads and it was a lot of fun and it was a lot of togetherness with all the teachers, all the staff and kids you aren’t as close with in your class you become closer with at the banquet… We definitely won’t be able to get that and I definitely won’t be able to have my family see me work on my accomplishments because a lot of them won’t come if it’s just in a car.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: I’m attending Grant Macewan for a Bachelor of Arts in psychology to do a career as a prison psychologist.
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
Corbyn Colwell- Frank Maddock High School
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “Motivation. Just having a hard time keeping up with school because we keep going in and out of it. So the learning styles are different even.”
Q: Academically, how has Covid affected you this year?
A: “I’m pretty sure there has been a drop but there are some classes where the work has somehow gotten easier… I noticed with a lot of my friends that we focus on one subject more than the others during online school so we get behind so our grades all fluctuate due to that.”
Q: Senior year usually involves tons of social events. How has Covid affected this?
A: “I feel like I don’t know most of my class as much as the previous classes have but I have gotten closer to the people who are actually in my classes.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “I’m liking how it’s gonna be outside and a little bit quieter than it usually is but I am a little disappointed that there’s a possibility that we won’t get a prom.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: “My plan is to work for a year and try to figure out what I wanna do. And then I’m going to go to school.”
Delaina Osborne– Frank Maddock High School
Q: What has been the biggest struggle for you doing your senior year through Covid?
A: “Definitely motivation and burnout… Because I’m so academically orientated I have to get really high grades to feel successful so to have to combat going from in person learning to at home learning was very stressful and then very unmotivating because have the time we would be doing things and then all the sudden they wouldn’t matter anymore and so after first semester my burnout hit really really hard and so it made things very difficult to see the point of continuing.”
Q: Senior year usually involves tons of social events. How has Covid affected this?
A: “Because we are seniors we expect that this year is to be all about our graduation and all about our success so we want to go out and we want to go to Edmonton on the weekends, we want to go swimming, we want to hang out and stuff and we haven’t had the ability to do that and actually be able to celebrate us as like this transition period in our lives… So I think socially it was very detrimental and a lot of people did suffer from that whether that be just they are very extroverted or just the fact that they felt like they weren’t mattering anymore.”
Q: Graduation will look a little different this year, what are your thoughts on it?
A: “The school is doing a lot with what they have… I’m hoping that with restrictions opening up hopefully early July then myself and others can celebrate. It just sucks that we won’t be around our teachers and we won’t be around the families who have supported us through all this. So we won’t be able to cross the stage and say hey I did this to everyone. It will just be myself, two other teachers and my parents.”
Q: What do your future plans look like?
A: “I am going to the University of Alberta for an English major and an art minor because I plan on applying myself to more of the arts in my future.”
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Here in Alberta, Noah is once again the most popular name for newborn boys, according to info that winged its way into my inbox a couple of weeks ago from the nice people at Service Alberta. On the girls’ side Olivia took the top spot in 2025, as she has done for the last several years.
It’s an interesting phenomenon* that kids’ names seem to drift in and out of fashion, like long hair, flared jeans and the federal New Democrats. Some of that is probably due to the impact of celebrities. It should surprise nobody if we see an uptick in Taylors due to the global dominance of Taylor Swift, while recent events mean the popularity of Andrew is likely to fall off a cliff.**
Looking back at my elementary school class, we had a couple of Davids, a Stephen, an Allan… on the girls’ side there was Jennifer, June, Dorothy and Elspeth. There was also a cluster of more overtly Scottish names: Alastair, Fraser, Morag and several Fionas. Little did any of them dream that more than 50 years later they’d be name checked in the Drayton Valley and District Free Press. What a strange world we live in.
Anyway, there were certainly no Noahs, apart from that guy with the boat from the Bible, who was not in my class (I’m old but not that old) so doesn’t really count. I don’t remember any Olivias either, although back then girls were both terrifying and mysterious to me, so who knows.
What I can tell you is that you couldn’t swing a cat in 1960s Glasgow without hitting a Graham.*** At one point there were three of us in my elementary class. Since I moved to Canada I believe I’ve only met one. ****
Meanwhile here in present day Alberta the rest of the top six boys’ names for last year were Theodore, Oliver, Henry, Jack and Lucas. Amelia, Emma, Sophia, Charlotte, and Violet round out the girls’ side.
There were more than 52,000 little bundles of joy registered in this province in 2025, with 14,500 unique names. That sounds like a lot, but presumably some are close to duplicates, so Brandy, Brandi and Brandee counts three times, which doesn’t seem fair really.
Anyway, it doesn’t look like there were any Grahaminas, and my daughter didn’t appear to be particularly taken with the suggestion. So if anyone out there is looking for a unique name for their newborn, Grahamina is there for the taking. You can thank me later. Although I suspect your daughter may not be so grateful
* Disclaimer: Phenomenon may not actually be interesting.
** That’s cliff as in geographical feature, not Cliff as in Clifford. Writing is hard.
***This was before the European Union stepped in and banned cat swinging across the continent.
**** I mean one Graham. I’ve met lots of cats. That’s cats as in Tom Kitten, not cats as in Cat Stevens. I’ve never met him.
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division. “Classroom complexity was one of those pieces.”
Last fall, the province began collecting data surrounding the issue. The final report was released on November 21. The list of school divisions that have been assigned complexity teams was released on February 12. Teams consisting of one teacher and two educational assistants (EAs) are being sent to 476 schools with K-6 students.
“If there are additional dollars, those can be used for therapeutic supports,” says Mattia. She says the Province gave the divisions a list of supports that can be selected from in these cases, which may include speech therapists, occupational therapists, among others.
The divisions will have to send in quarterly reports to the Province, but Mattia says at this point she doesn’t know if those teams will be offering pull-out supports or inclusive supports for the students.
WRSD was assigned one team, which will be working at Rocky Christian School in Rocky Mountain House. The St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic School Division was assigned two teams, which will be placed at Sacred Heart School in Wetaskiwin and St. Augustine School in Ponoka.
At this point, no teams have been assigned to any schools in this area. More than 75 percent of the teams were assigned to urban centres like Edmonton, Calgary, Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray.
Schools with K-6 students in Drayton Valley, Breton, Entwistle, Evansburg, and Tomahawk do not have complexity teams assigned to them at the time of publication.
Mattia says the divisions didn’t have any say in where the teams were originally assigned. However, the Province has allowed the divisions to submit a change request by February 20. Whether those changes will be accepted remains to be seen.
“In our school division, every single one of our schools has complexity,” says Mattia. “It’s throughout the division; it’s at all grade levels.”
She says as a division, they continue to tackle complexity through their staffing, support teams, and divisional support.
“It’s not like we don’t have speech-language assistants, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists. [The complexity teams are] additional support,” she says.
In some ways, the complexity team at Rocky Christian School may allow the division to allocate some funds to other schools, says Mattia. With extra support for that school from the Province, they may be able to save a little bit of money on additional supports they might have had to provide for the school.
Mattia says they have already received the funding for the teams, but one of the issues is finding the staff to comprise those teams. “Staffing, recruitment, and retention is a significant challenge for rural education,” she says.
She says the division has positions that have been open since the fall, and they are aware it may not be easy to hire staff for the team. Recruitment and retention of teachers in the rural areas of the province has been an ongoing challenge for many years.
Though this first phase has seen most of the supports going toward urban centres, Mattia says they are hopeful there will be more available for rural communities in the future. In the meantime, she says the division offers great supports for their students and families.
“The divisional team and our school teams, they really do phenomenal work with our students and for our families,” says Mattia. “We’re going to continue to support, in our best possible way, student success. That won’t change.”
The Free Press reached out to the STAR Catholic School Division, but did not receive a response before the publication deadline.
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School. Last weekend, he returned to FMHS to share his own mental health journey and different strategies people can use if they are facing similar struggles.
Elaine Tamboline, the past president of the Drayton Valley Rotary Club, says picking Gardiner for the role of keynote speaker was an easy one. As the most awarded announcer in Canadian history, Gardiner has won Pro Rodeo Announcer of the Year 14 times, she says. He has announced at the Canadian Finals Rodeo, the Calgary Stampede, and since 2016 has been a regular on TSN’s series for the Professional Bull Riding Canada Cup.
Along with his awards in announcing, Gardiner holds a master’s degree in counselling and psychology, and has worked with professional athletes, educators, and large business organizations.
But his local connection also recommended him for the event.
“I think that’s how it started. Some of us knew his mother,” says Tamboline.
The symposium took place on February 21 and was hosted by the Drayton Valley Rotary Club in partnership with the Healthy Communities Coalition. The all-day event had 13 breakout sessions for attendees, two of which were hosted by Gardiner.
“Mental health is such a huge umbrella,” says Tamboline.
The symposium tackled some major topics, such as Canada’s Red Flag Law, understanding legal protections for survivors of domestic violence, Men’s Shed, recognizing and preventing sexual exploitation in youth, and
To make the free event even more accessible for residents, Brighter Futures provided childcare so parents could attend the sessions.
Tamboline says the decision to host the event came from a community needs assessment conducted by the Rotary Club.
“[We wanted to] determine what issues people were most concerned about in our town,” says Tamboline. “That took ten months.”
She says they spoke one-on-one with individuals whose demographics varied from homeless people, business professionals, single parents, seniors, and more.
“Their concerns were many, and they fell under the umbrella of mental health,” she says. “This is not surprising or unique because it has become a topic across Canada and around the world.”
The Rotary Club is most well known for its work on eradicating polio. With 1.2 million members in more than 32,000 clubs in 200 countries, Tamboline says they have many other mandates. Some apply to certain areas, some to certain communities, as well as worldwide concerns. At their last international convention in Singapore, with 20,000 attendees, mental health was a hot topic.
Tamboline says after their needs assessment, the Rotary Club partnered with the HCC to come up with strategies to help connect people in need to professional resources in the community. The symposium was their solution.
The Rotary Club hopes to make the symposium an annual event that can reverberate throughout the community. Tamboline says they will be watching to see how it has affected the community and if they have achieved any of the outcomes they were hoping for.
Tamboline says the organizers are grateful to all the organizations that came together to make the symposium a reality.
“[We have] gratitude and appreciation for the generous support and donations, and volunteers who believed this is important.”
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945. Upon hearing this R- felt such a sense of pride and connection to a whole host of family whom she never met, and have long been dead.
Family history is often reduced to a series of names, birthdates and death dates. This is a great place to start but the real connection happens when you manage to find a snippet of information or a piece of family lore that gives one of those names a personality. For me this journey began with my Auntie Gwen and her book “The Keystone Legacy.” Writing through the voice of my uncle Mark, they recorded the day to day lives of early black settlers living in Keystone (Breton); clearing land, building tar paper shacks, cold winters, and going to school and church. To anyone living in that time the book would have been a snore. But, the book was published in 1997, 90 years after the first settler moved to the area and guess what happened! More time passed.
As decades wore on and storytellers died, the value of this book increased. What used to be just a collection of stories and recollections has now become a primary source document for other books and a very cherished piece of family history.
This week I had the privilege of sharing a bit about my family history at the Drayton Valley Multi Cultural Association’s first black heritage event. As I walked into the room and saw African art lining the walls, vibrant clothing for sale and heard personal stories from those first generation Canadians in attendance, I had a sudden flash of imposter syndrome. Here are people who are so close to their immigration story that my historical stories about slavery, segregation, and land politics seemed old news, and out of touch.
However, in the scope of history even a century doesn’t seem that long. As I was talking to this group about my story I was inspired to press on them how much their story will mean to their future family. Documenting why you came to Canada, and what early life was like doesn’t seem like much right now but to someone six or seven generations later, it may be just the piece of information they needed to hear to feel that they belong.
Throughout my genealogy journey I have been lucky to have found shreds of newspaper clippings, land allotment interviews, references to my family in the books, “The Keystone Legacy,” “The Ghost of Crook County,” and “The Black Prairie Archives,” and of course the endless source of information and connection of Allan Goddard and the Breton Historical Society. Some may not be as lucky, but as is the case with my daughter, when her great-grandpa built a camp in 1945 he unintentionally built a bridge to future generations.
Not too long ago, I heard a complaint about youth being too lazy to get jobs nowadays. That annoys me to no end because not only is it painting an entire generation with a broad brush, the blame for lower employment rates is placed solely at the feet of the youth, which is not right.
I started working when I was about 15 years old. At that point, my starting wage was about $6.95, and getting a ten cent an hour raise was awesome.
I didn’t struggle to find a job. I basically dropped off my resume to several businesses, went for the first interview, and got hired. While I may not have appreciated the job, I never worried about what my work schedule was, if they were paying me what I was owed, or if they were meeting labour laws.
My parents also didn’t really have to worry about it.
However, my first experience of seeing the abuse (I don’t use this term lightly) of a youth at a job was as an adult, around my mid-20s. At that point, I’d worked enough jobs to understand shady behaviour when I saw it, so it really bothered me to see employers taking advantage of young workers.
Fast forward to about five or six years ago, and things have only gotten worse.
The common misconception that youth just don’t want to work anymore fails to take into consideration the work environment we insist they join. Not only are there fewer jobs available for youth, but many employers are far more interested in making money than introducing youth into the workforce.
For those who have been lucky enough to find jobs, I have heard about some awful, and frankly, downright illegal things taking place.
In one case, a pizza delivery driver who was paid per delivery and tips was expected to be at the workplace for an entire eight-hour shift without getting paid. If there were only two deliveries that night, their base pay for the entire shift was a whopping $7.
Another situation I’ve heard about is a youth who was hired to work at a new business in the community. They were brought in with numerous other youths in the community for mass orientation sessions. Half of the kids who showed up, having been told they were hired, were turned away at the door or never actually got to work for the company.
This same company would change the shifts for kids with barely 24-hours notice, didn’t fill out any paperwork for their new staff, and made false promises of rewards for teams who worked the hardest.
Once that company decided who they wanted to keep around, they let go of some employees, who were mostly in high school, by text message on a school day.
Yes. A business that has a name that everyone would recognize fired kids by text message while they were at school. Illegal? No. Unethical? Absolutely; not to mention cowardly and callous.
Imagine how these kids felt learning they’d been fired from their first job, with zero explanation, while they were sitting in class at school. I’m sure they were eager to go out and find another job after that.
Other stories include bringing in a youth to try out for the job for a day without pay, and then ghosting them afterward; convoluted pay structures and bonuses that make it difficult for employees to know if they were being paid appropriately; and sending them out to do dangerous work without the appropriate training.
The moral of this story? Before business owners want to complain about the apathetic youth of today, they need to recognize that their attitudes and practices might just be the reason for this problem.
The Team Auctions Centre will be a busy place in March as it hosts the U11 A and B teams Division Finals on two different weekends.
Kara Westerlund, a member of the social committee for the event, says this community was selected after the Drayton Valley Minor Hockey Association put in a bid with Hockey Alberta.
“We came out on top,” says Westerlund. “I’ve been involved in hockey for a while; this is the first time we’ve ever been successful … so it’s quite exciting.”
DVMHA is expecting up to nine teams for the finals. Two of those teams will be from Drayton, as the host team always gets a spot, even if they aren’t in the top spot to make the finals.
“The neat thing is that both the A and the B team are at the top of their league right now, but that could change in a heartbeat with the games that are remaining,” says Westerlund.
The first weekend, March 7 and 8, will be the finals for the B teams, and the second weekend, March 14 and 15, will be for the A team.
Putting on the event will take the work of many volunteers, says Westerlund. She says they will need people to organize volunteers, to put together the player bags, cover the clocks for the games, score keep, play the music, man the penalty boxes, and more to keep everything running smoothly.
Some local businesses have also stepped up to help out with the finals, says Westerlund, with one providing all the hockey pucks for the event.
“Outside of the hockey… it’s so cool for our community to be picked to host something like this,” says Westerlund. “There’s potentially up to nine teams that are going to be in town, and there’s an average of 16 to 18 kids on a team.”
Westerlund says they already know they are going to fill up at least one hotel, with a high likelihood of filling two or more for both weekends in March.
“When they come, they bring their families and they have to eat, so the whole hospitality side and service industry in Drayton is going to see a massive boost that weekend for sure,” she says.
Ryan Fynn, the president of the Drayton Valley Hospitality and Tourism Authority, says these types of events are always great for the community.
He says with 150 hotel rooms being booked for two nights, the food, the fuel, and possible shopping, the economic impact will be around $200,000 put back into the community.
“Any time these finals come to Drayton, it’s always been how can we help them the best,” he says. “The biggest thing is highlighting the community and making these teams want to come back to Drayton.”
Fynn says the DVHTA has always supported minor hockey with sponsorship funds, marketing opportunities, or items for the players’ bags.
“It definitely falls right in line with what we’re all about,” he says. “We’re excited that they were awarded the bid from Hockey Alberta and glad they’re able to follow through with it.”
Westerlund says aside from the economic benefits of these events, there’s something that’s even more important.
“All the work is worth it; it’s for the kids at the end of the day,” says Westerlund. “We all know, even as adults, that moments like this and weekends like this are memorable for the rest of their lives. They will remember this.”
She says they want to make sure the event is special for the kids and shows off the community.
What’s in a name? I’m glad you asked
I suggested to my daughter that she name her first child Grahamina if it’s a girl. I haven’t managed to come up with a good boy’s name yet.
Classroom complexity an issue
After hearing the concerns of teachers and parents during the teachers’ strike last October, the provincial government has assigned their first phase of complexity teams to schools across the province.
“The classroom complexity [teams are] the Alberta Government’s response .. (to) the labour action,” says Jodie Mattia, the superintendent of Wild Rose School Division.
Symposium puts focus on mental health
One of Canada’s most sought-after rodeo announcers and motivational speakers returned to his hometown last weekend as the keynote speaker at the Mental Health Awareness Symposium.
Brett Gardiner was born and raised near Drayton Valley and has a grad photo hanging on the walls of Frank Maddock High School.
Shared history is a foundation for the future
Last year we sent our daughter to summer camp, at the request of one of her friends. A text to my husband revealed that this was the summer camp he went to as a kid, as well as his mom and his grandmother. A deeper search showed that his great-grandfather helped build the camp back in 1945.
