Shelley Svidal
Only one month into his new portfolio, Education Minister Ron Liepert exudes the confidence of a veteran cabinet minister, testament to his 30-plus-years’ experience as a journalist, public relations practitioner and businessman and the two years he has served his constituents as MLA for Calgary-West. His third-floor office, with its just-moved-in feel, is airy and bright, the high windows facing north toward downtown Edmonton and west toward the river valley.
Liepert (pronounced LYE-pert) graduated from the Columbia School of Broadcasting in 1971 before embarking on an eight-year career in radio and television journalism. After beginning his career with Moose Jaw’s CHAB Radio, he returned to Alberta to take up a position with CFCW, one of Edmonton’s country stations. He then moved to Broadcast News before covering the legislature beat for ITV (now Global TV).
In 1980, then Premier Peter Lougheed offered him a position as his press secretary, a position Liepert held until 1985 when Lougheed retired. Liepert subsequently worked for Alberta Economic Development and Trade, running the province’s trade office in Los Angeles for four years. That was followed by a 10-year stint with Telus, practising media and government relations and directing the executive office. Leaving Telus in 1999 when it merged with BC Tel, Liepert opened his own public relations practice and purchased a child care centre in downtown Calgary.
In appointing his cabinet last month, Premier Ed Stelmach took a page from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s playbook by issuing mandate letters to each of his ministers, detailing the priorities and tasks he expects them to accomplish. One of the three priorities detailed in Liepert’s letter is to initiate negotiations on options for a reasonable long-term solution to teachers’ unfunded pension liability.
"I want to go way beyond that," the minister says. "I want to resolve this issue. Maybe I’m being too naïve and too bold, but I want to get it fixed. I do not view myself, no matter what I do, as status quo or caretaker. I am a finisher of a job. So somehow we’re going to get this thing fixed. And we’re not going to get it fixed by imposing so-called solutions on anybody. We’re going to get it fixed by sitting across the table with one another, going nose to nose and saying, ‘You win. We win. We both win.’"
A second priority asks Liepert to develop a strategy to improve Alberta’s high school completion rates. The minister readily admits he was once part of the problem he is now being asked to resolve. Motivated by "a hunger for business" and a few of what he characterizes as "bad teachers" in small-town Saskatchewan, he dropped out of high school in Grade 11 only to enrol in postsecondary studies after a four-year stint in a meat-packing plant at minimum wage. "While it’s not something I’m very proud of, it is fact, and I’m not going to run and hide from it," he says.
He adds that the quality of the teaching profession has improved dramatically in the intervening years. Even then, there was one teacher who had a very positive influence on the young Liepert. "He had the ability to motivate on fear but with respect," the minister says, "and so to this day I remember him. You did not screw up because you knew he would call you on it. He was intelligent, but he also saw past your marks and saw your abilities as an individual, and for some reason, he and I got along well even though I wasn’t a very good student."
So how does an erstwhile high school dropout intend to tackle high school completion rates? Liepert suggests that the problem requires multiple solutions and that Alberta is already headed in the right direction, with high school completion rates rising incrementally in recent years. He also suggests that, in many cases, the seeds of noncompletion are sown early in life—before age 10. "If we can make progress at the early stage of school life, I believe we will have a greater success rate at the end of the school term," he says.
Liepert’s take on high school completion dovetails nicely with his third priority—exploring options to provide children with access to early learning opportunities. While reluctant to draw a connection between his experiences as owner/operator of a child care centre and junior and full-day kindergarten, he indicates those experiences taught him the value of early intervention. As owner/operator, he was called to the centre every time a social worker came to apprehend a child or a parent breached a restraining order. "You can read about it in the paper all you want, but when you’re dealing with it a foot away, eyeball to eyeball, it’s a whole different story," he says.
He also indicates he has asked ministry officials for help on the early learning priority. "I don’t come into this thing saying I have all the answers or any of the answers," he says. "My job is to pull the best out of everywhere and then sell it at the cabinet table."
In the mandate letters, Stelmach invites his ministers to bring forward additional ideas that will assist the government in accomplishing its goals. Liepert has one such idea—to ensure that, as he puts it, "schools are where kids live."
His own constituency of Calgary-West has sprung up within the last 20 years, and most homes are fewer than 10 years old. School construction has not kept pace with home building, and as a result, children are spending up to two hours each day on the bus, travelling to and from schools that otherwise, Liepert suggests, would not have enough students to justify keeping them open.
"That is not good for the children, it is stressful for the parents and it’s costing the government a lot of money for transportation," he says. "We need to come up with some creative ways of getting education facilities in the neighbourhoods where people live. The school bus is not an education facility."
Liepert sees public–private partnerships, including developer-owned schools, as a potential solution to the problem. He points out that physicians rarely own the buildings out of which they practice, "so why do we have to own the buildings that the kids go to school in?" he asks. "We set the curriculum. We, being government [and] school boards, hire the teachers. Who cares who owns the building?"
The new minister is proud of Alberta’s education system, which he describes as one of the best in the world. He attributes that success to stakeholders, who have "an unwavering commitment to providing the highest quality education in the world"; to a challenging and adaptive curriculum; and to choice at both the curricular and school levels.
"You’re not going to get me coming into this role saying we’ve got to reinvent the education system," he says. "In my view, you never mess with success. . . . You find out why it’s successful, you continue to improve on the things that are making it successful, and if there are some things that are dragging it down, then those are the ones that you work on getting fixed."
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