Westwood Collegiate staff win music award

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This article was published 29/10/2021 (1743 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The sound of silence was never an option for the staff behind Westwood Collegiate’s band program.

This month, the Manitoba Band Association recognized that dedication by choosing the school’s administrators for one of its most prestigious awards.

Principal Kevin Dueck and vice principals Sarah James and Leah Jones accepted the association’s 2021 outstanding administrator award. The award ceremony was held via Zoom during the MBA’s annual general meeting on Oct. 22. Students and staff at Westwood Collegiate watched the meeting live from the band room.

This win marks two firsts.

The outstanding administrator award has never been handed down to more than one leader per year, and this is the first time Westwood Collegiate has brought home this particular honour.

Westwood Collegiate’s band director Greg Edwards nominated the trio.

“If I’m the car, they’re the fuel tank,” Edwards said.

The pandemic has made it especially difficult for classes, like band, which thrive on hands-on learning and in-person collaboration, to engage students. Instead of backing down, Edwards saw this as an opportunity to dig in.

“I refused — I just refused — to turn this into a music theory class,” Edwards said. “But we did find ways to succeed. Without the support from behind the scenes, it would’ve fallen to pieces … As a team, I felt almost like I couldn’t fail.”

Edwards recounted, with gratitude and fervour, the many ways the administrators supported his program throughout the pandemic. Dueck, James and Jones encouraged Edwards’ creative solutions, parsed out what the public health restrictions meant for the students and instructors in real time, and carved the budget necessary to make Edwards’ vision come to life.

“We followed the public health protocols for band and choral to the letter,” Dueck said.

“We knew that we had someone who was leading the program who was well-educated, and we just had to make sure we had permission all the way through to do some creative things.”  

Edwards’ explained that he felt confident about the long hours he poured into the program amid the pandemic, knowing that the administration would support his strategies.

His efforts paid off.

Attendance held steady when the classes went online, and in June, six of Edwards’s student bands earned five stars for performances at the Manitoba Band Association’s Flexible Family of Festivals.

“After 27 years of doing this job, it reaffirmed that just about anything is possible,” he said.

While Edwards believes he couldn’t have found this level of success without Dueck, James and Jones, it’s clear the feeling is mutual by how the admins speak of the last year and a half.

“It was a really good example of how we can work together to problem solve through what may seem like an insurmountable barrier,” James said.

Jones echoed James’ outlook.

“To have a whole new class outside of the school hour so they (the students) could continue with the program … that was inspirational,” Jones said.

Chelsey Hiebert, executive director of the MBA, remarked that Westwood Collegiate is arguably her organization’s longest standing legacy program. Throughout the pandemic, she said, the school was one of only three bands in the province that was able to participate in MBA programming.

“Last year, I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like on the ground in a school,” Hiebert said.

“For this amazing crew of four people to come through and just send the kids to nationals, get them playing in festivals, and again, following those health orders that were changing every week …”

The MBA’s outstanding administrator award is a warm send-off for the vice principals. James is now the vice principal of Sturgeon Heights Collegiate, and Jones has moved on to Lincoln Middle School.