Fired principal could work for Vale

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This article was published 23/04/2011 (5528 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THOMPSON’S giant mining company Vale could soon announce the hiring of recently fired local high school principal Ryan Land.

Sources say the Brazilian mining company has hired Land for a management job in Thompson, less than three weeks after Mystery Lake school trustees upheld Land’s firing as principal of R.D. Parker Collegiate despite huge student and public support for Land.

“We haven’t made any public announcement. Mr. Land was interviewed for a role in the corporate affairs office,” Cory McPhee, Vale’s vice-president of corporate affairs, said from Toronto.

McPhee would not confirm the company has made a hiring decision, but said a public announcement is imminent.

McPhee said the corporate affairs manager in Thompson answers to him, and deals with a wide variety of government and community groups — including the Mystery Lake School Division.

McPhee said the corporate affairs manager distributes financial and staff assistance and support to a wide range of groups. “Certainly, education is part of it. Typically, it’s support for specific programs,” McPhee said.

While Vale is aware of some events within the school division, events at Mystery Lake and R.D. Parker play no part in its hiring decisions, McPhee said.

Land did not respond to an emailed request for an interview. He has declined to comment throughout an extraordinary chain of events in the turmoil-plagued school division.

Mystery Lake has had three superintendents and eight assistant superintendents in the past three years; R.D. Parker has had three principals and nine vice-principals. Trustees have refused to share details with the public or to answer public demands about the costs of firing or buying out so many senior administrators.

Land, a veteran Canadian educator, was heading an international school in Ghana when he was recruited to Thompson two years ago.

Last spring, school trustees took the remarkable step of dealing with personnel issues in public when they rebuked Land in a public session of the board.

The Manitoba Teachers’ Society has filed a grievance over that public rebuke.

Trustees voted in March to fire Land and to demote one of his vice-principals. That led to a widespread public protest in which hundreds of students and parents demonstrated in support of Land and demanded he be reinstated.

But at an April 5 school board meeting, trustees voted 5-2 to uphold Land’s firing. He has also grieved that decision in a separate legal action.

Residents and students have repeatedly raised concerns that conflict-of-interest legislation does not cover the situation in which three of the seven trustees have spouses working in the school division, two of them at the high school.

Education Minister Nancy Allan maintained her silence this week on what is happening in Thompson.

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca