Emery's Enterprise in Edmonton - Brief Article

School Administrator, May, 2001

As longtime readers would recognize, we rarely turn over the majority of any one issue of The School Administrator to spotlight a single school district. But we are making an exception this month.

We think you will appreciate learning in considerable detail about an extraordinary school district that operates north of the border in Alberta, Canada. For some time, the Edmonton Public Schools have been known as a district that embraced site-based decision making and made it work. During the past five years Edmonton has essentially recreated itself as a system of choice for its 81,000 students.

The district offers a highly imaginative array of about 30 programs (with more added on an ongoing basis) from which students and their parents can choose. They range from traditional back-to-basics curricula and schools with strict dress codes to programs suited to fledgling ice hockey stars (with their frequent travel needs), artistic students and those who want the highest academic rigors of an International Baccalaureate program.

More startling, Edmonton's umbrella of choices also covers several programs tailored to home-schoolers and families who want elements of their Christian faith served with their academic fare.

Our coverage includes an overview by Emery Dosdall, Edmonton's superintendent and an AASA member for 21 years. (That's him on this month's cover, surrounded by students from various school programs.) In addition, you'll find articles about the customer orientation of the district's central-office staff, the work of principals as franchise operators and the use of leased facilities to house the many new programs.

I hope you will agree that this long visit north is one worth taking.

Jay P. Goldman

Voice: 703-875-0745

E-mail: jgoldman@aasa.org