Mike Safek is retiring as Osoyoos Secondary School principal after an eventful year that capped off a long career in education. The school won a last-minute reprieve from closure and it introduced a flexible timetable. (Richard McGuire photo)

When Mike Safek steps down as principal at Osoyoos Secondary School (OSS) after the end of this school year, he can look back on a remarkable finale to a long career in education.

A year ago at this time, OSS was slated for closure. Only a last-minute cash injection by the province saved the school.

Not only did Safek and his colleagues manage to change course abruptly, throwing the closure into reverse, but they also launched an innovative, new flexible timetable that gave students more course offerings.

Safek, 55, decided last fall it was time to retire. A heart attack in July 2014 led him to re-evaluate what was important in life.

“When an event like that happens to you, it forces you to look at life in a different way and changes your perspective,” he said. “It was very difficult arriving at the decision, because I don’t know if I’m ready to retire. I love being a Rattler and I love being principal of OSS. I feel a very strong attachment to the building, to our students, the families and the community.”

The flexible timetable was one way to address the challenge of being a small school with declining enrolment. But Safek considers it a success.

“As a small school, the smaller you get, the harder it becomes to give kids elective options in the

Grade 10, 11 and 12 grad program,” he said. “It restricts their pathway to graduation. If kids don’t have lots of options, they all end up having similar timetables.”

With the flexible timetable, the school was able to add nine additional for-credit courses for senior students so they could develop more personalized programs.

These included fine arts courses, business, humanities and athletics.

“We were able to give kids a much more rounded selection of course offerings,” said Safek, adding that one measure of success is that fewer students had to rely on YouLearn’s distributed learning to make up their courses.

The new schedule had the additional benefit of allowing students to spend more time on the courses they were struggling with and reduce the time they spent on courses they could do easily.

“It’s given our students the flexibility to adjust their schedules to their learning needs based on their strengths and challenges,” said Safek.

Of course the decision to keep the school open was a huge relief for many students after the stressful previous year.

“The energy in the building in September was wonderful,” said Safek. “I think our students were certainly happy to be back … I don’t think I heard one student say they would have preferred to have gone somewhere else.”

He admits there was a lot of work to reverse course and keep the school open as well as to implement the new schedule.

“It was a real scramble and we managed to get that done,” he said. “It would have been better if we’d had five months of planning time like we normally do, but we did the very best we could.”

For Safek, his recent stretch as OSS principal from September 2013 to the present was his third time at the school.

He also served as vice principal in the early 2000s before transferring to become principal of Okanagan Falls Elementary School. He then returned to OSS for a stint as principal before spending two years running a fine art school in the Kamloops school district.

“My wife and I just missed the Okanagan so much that we wanted to get back to the Okanagan and I was hired to Oliver Elementary as principal,” he said, outlining the steps in an education career that started in 1986.

After Oliver Elementary, he was back again as principal of OSS in 2013.

Safek, who grew up in East Vancouver, started his career in Coquitlam, but has been at schools in the Okanagan since 1996, except for his two years in Kamloops.

Being at OSS over three different periods, he said, explains his attachment to the school and to his recent time as principal.

“Of all the jobs I’ve had through my career, it’s been the best, the highlight of my career,” he said. “There’s something special about this school and about working in this community and with these students. Like any principal assignment, it’s not without its challenges, but I have loved every minute of it and that has made the decision to retire very, very difficult.”

Safek plans to continue living at the family home between Penticton and Okanagan Falls in the foreseeable future, but beyond that he hasn’t spent a lot of time pondering what he’ll do in retirement.

“My passions are fishing and skiing, so I’ll certainly be doing that, and I will do some travelling as well,” he said. “But beyond that, I haven’t really thought.”

Instead, Safek says he and Vice Principal Lyle Chapmen have been focused on leaving the school in good shape and well organized for his successor, Scott Tremblay from Similkameen Elementary Secondary School, who will take his place in the fall.

“I’m so passionate about what the school has started and the road that we’re on that I’d like to stay connected in some way,” said Safek. “I’m just not sure what that will look like.”

RICHARD McGUIRE

Osoyoos Times

Mike Safek, the principal of Osoyoos Secondary School, says his decision to retire was a very difficult one because he loves the school and his job. (Richard McGuire photo)