When Jason Petlak moved to Oxbow in January 1991, he thought he would be there for a couple of years, and then he’d move on.
He never imagined he would still be in the community three decades later.
“I enjoyed the community and I enjoyed the school and enjoy the staff and students,” he said. “Time just goes quick. I can remember things from the very first day I walked into the building.”
“That’s the one thing about education – the students, the staff and the community can really have a bearing on where you’re at, because it really has an impact on decisions to move and those types of things,” he added later.
Petlak, who is originally from the east-central community of Goodeve, has announced that he is retiring at the end of the 2020-21 school year, bringing an end to a long career as an educator, most of it spent as a principal.
“It’s always a difficult decision, but after 30 years, you’ve done what you wanted to do in the educational field, and there’s some other things in life that come up. You want to enjoy retirement while a person can, and I think that’s something with COVID that has popped up is to make sure the time that you spend with your family and those types of things become quite important,” he told the Mercury.
His career started by teaching Grade 9 students at the former Oxbow Prairie Heights School. In the fall of 1997, he became the school’s principal.
When the town’s elementary and Prairie Heights were merged into Oxbow Prairie Horizons School in 2011, Petlak became its principal.
“There was always a new challenge that was right within Oxbow that presented itself,” said Petlak, who has a hard time believing it’s been nearly 10 years since Prairie Horizons opened.
The building still looks brand new, he said.
When he first started teaching in Oxbow, it was still part of the old Oxbow School Division. A merger happened in the 1990s to create the Souris-Moose Mountain School Division, and then Souris-Moose Mountain was amalgamated with five other school divisions to form the South East Cornerstone Public School Division in 2006.
There was also the shift in going from being a teacher to a principal, and in guiding a Grade 9-12 school to being the principal of a pre-kindergarten to Grade 12 school.
Technology has come a long ways, too, with what they’re able to bring to students.
“When I first moved here, our computer lab had a Tandy 1000 with five and a half-inch floppy disks, with no hard drive space, and we were still using registers to do daily attendance.”
Now they’re able to offer online learning for students. Vice-principal Mark Kosior now offers a robotics class to the students.
Three of his former students are now on staff at Prairie Horizons, including Kosior.
“It makes you feel good that people are going into the education field and going into administration, and it makes you feel good that they also want to come back and teach in the community they grow up in and went to school in,” he said.
Not only has he taught the children of former students, but now grandchildren of his early students can be found at Prairie Horizons.
There was some thought to remaining at the school for one more year, due to the uncertainty caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, but this seemed like the right time to move onto something new.
“Teaching very much is not a job, it’s a lifestyle, and one’s identity is wrapped into the whole concept of being a teacher, so it’s never easy to walk away from that, but I wanted to have the opportunity to try different things,” he said.
But it’s definitely not the way he envisioned his final year in education.
COVID-19 has posed challenges, but it has also shown the quality of the students and staff in Oxbow to adapt and meet the challenges associated with the virus.
“It just shows how resilient the staff and the students are,” he said.
Petlak is looking forward to spending time with family. He knows of a lot of former colleagues who go into substitute teaching upon retiring, but it’s not something he plans to do at this time.
He has a home in Goodeve, and he will likely return there for that extra time with his family.
