Penny Duperron has announced she plans to run for the trustee vacancy on the board of School District 53. Others have mused on social media about running, but have not yet announced. Nominations close on Friday, Sept. 30. (Richard McGuire photo)
At least one candidate will be running for school board trustee when School District 53 holds a by-election to fill the vacancy left by long-time trustee June Harrington, who is stepping down.
Penny Duperron, an Osoyoos resident who spoke out this spring against closing Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS), said she was submitting her nomination papers Tuesday.
The nomination runs from Sept. 20 until Friday, Sept. 30, at which time the final list of candidates will be declared.
At least two others have mused on social media that they are considering running, but no one else has made a public statement at this time.
If any other candidates are nominated, there will be a by-election on Nov. 5. If only Duperron is nominated, she would take the position by acclamation.
“I value education,” said Duperron. “I think education is key to our children’s success and I want to play a part in shaping the education that our children are receiving.”
Duperron said she would be a strong voice for ensuring that children receive quality education in their own community.
Duperron, who moved to Osoyoos in 2002 from Smithers, said she’s been raising two grandchildren in Osoyoos, one of whom graduated from OSS in 2014 and one still at OSS in Grade 11.
Although she’s helped out “in the background” with the OSS Parent Advisory Council (PAC), she says she was more active with a PAC when her own children attended school in Smithers and she served as vice-chair.
Duperron was a childcare worker at an alternate school in Smithers and worked as a substitute teacher and Kindergarten teachers’ aide, but she is not trained as a teacher. She did, however, attend University of Alberta in the Bachelor of Physical Education program.
She was born in Princeton, but moved a lot as a child due to her father’s work, but spent a number of years growing up in Clinton, a village in the Cariboo.
Her sister still lives there and is a trustee in Gold Trail School District 74.
“I saw how much passion she had and I thought that’s kind of cool,” Duperron said.
She had been considering running as a school trustee in 2018, but decided to run in the by-election when Harrington announced she was stepping down.
Initially she thought Brenda Dorosz, who led the fight to save OSS, might run and she didn’t want to oppose her. But Dorosz made clear she would not run as trustee and in fact signed Duperron’s nomination papers.
Duperron said the consultation process around the proposed closure of OSS showed that many people in the community have good ideas that should be evaluated.
“I’d love to be part of looking through them and studying them,” she said.
Duperron said that when OSS was previously threatened with closure in 2010-11, momentum for change was lost after the school remained open.
“We all just sat back and waited for somebody to take the lead,” she said. “And all of a sudden, here we are again. I don’t want that to happen again, so I want to be part of sitting down with the communities and saying what can we do to keep things going.”
She added that she wants all the schools to stay open and she doesn’t believe the Osoyoos community will shrink.
“It’s cheaper to keep them open now than it is to build a new one in the future,” she said.
Duperron said she learned first hand about the challenges students face when they are bused to a high school in another community. There was no schooling beyond Grade 10 in Clinton, so she had to go to school for grades 11 and 12 in Ashcroft.
She was the only one of the Clinton students able to take part on sports teams and in extracurricular activities.
“The other kids couldn’t get rides,” she said. “Or it was too inconvenient and sometimes practices were at 7 a.m. So it’s really important for me to keep Osoyoos Secondary open.”
RICHARD McGUIRE
Osoyoos Times
