THURSDAY
DECEMBER 7, 2017
2ND
SECTION
Andrew Pratt brings busing changes to Maple Grove school stocked in the classrooms. He can also be found in the classroom, helping students in different classes. “This is my first small school experience,” he said. “We are planning these plans together and then I hope implement them … I’m lucky in that I am still leading lessons.”
BY DESMOND DEVOY
desmond.devoy@metroland.com
Will it be a marathon or a sprint for Andrew Pratt at Maple Grove Public School? Pratt, who runs marathons and triathlons in his spare time, received the word that he would be the acting principal in July, after the initial replacement to Kevin Fisher took up another role instead, creating a hole that Pratt will now be filling at least until January. He’s hoping for “an opportunity to stay, that would be wonderful,” he said during an interview in his Lanark Village office on the morning of Monday, Nov. 27. Though, just in case, he offered that he is “open to working in another elementary or secondary setting,” if the school board decides he is needed elsewhere. “Mr. Fisher was here for six years,” he said of his predecessor, who is now the principal at North Elmsley Public School in Port Elmsley. They were “not easy shoes to fill,” he said. At the end of his third month on the job, he said that “it has been a very successful year here so far,” he said, with some changes being made to how children exit and enter the school during bus drop-off times. “It was safe,” he said of the existing drop-off routine, but, after meeting with the bus drivers, “they had some suggestions that were safer … the concern (was) that everyone is leaving at the same time,” he said. By having an area for kids who walk home or are picked up wait in a cordoned off area, “this took one worry off of their (bus
Desmond Devoy/Metroland
Have Abacus, Will Teach: Maple Grove Public School principal Andrew Pratt poses in his Lanark Village office on Monday, Nov. 27. drivers) plates,” said Pratt. He admits that he “had some questions from parents,” about the new waiting area, but since then, the plan appears to have worked. He often waits outside monitoring the cordoned-off area himself, until the buses leave. As an added bonus, it affords him an opportunity to talk to parents who are dropping off their children. “I talk the talk, but I also walk the walk,” he said. One thing that makes Maple Grove, along with nearby Sacred Heart Catholic elementary school, unique when
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compared to, say, schools in Perth, is not only that so many students are bused, but that so many get bused in from so far away. Pratt said that some students are on a bus for as long as 40 minutes, one way, which is why “every class starts with a snack, first thing in the day,” and why there is a recess front-loaded onto the day so that “they get to burn off that energy,” he said. He commended the volunteers who keep the school’s hot lunch program going, and the Food For Thought program which keeps snack bins fully
Biographic details Pratt’s father is from Barrie, while his mother is from Guelph, and the two met at the University of Toronto’s pharmaceutical school. After they were married, the couple moved around the province, and his father was even the pharmacy manager at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital in Ottawa for a time, before going in as a business partner in a drugstore. (Pratt is an only child.) Though born in Ottawa, Pratt moved to Lanark County when he was young, and grew up in Beckwith Township. He attended Caldwell Street Public School in Carleton Place from kindergarten to Grade 3, and was among the first to attend Beckwith Public School when it opened, attending to Grade 8, before attending Carleton Place High School (CPHS). As a teenager, he admits that it was now evident that he was destined for teaching, though he was, at the time, also contemplating careers in law or real estate. He worked as a family relief worker, and later as a camp counsellor at a day camp. He also helped start an autism student support team at CPHS.
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