BONNYVILLE – When Sherry Depner heard she was Lakeland Catholic School Division’s (LCSD) choice for the 2020 Excellence in Catholic Education Award, saying she was shocked is an understatement.
“I ugly cried for like two days,” Depner told the Nouvelle. “I work with so many wonderful people and even though I’ve been teaching a long time, 20 years, I’m always looking at people for inspiration and I’m always acknowledging the wonderful things that they do.”
The Excellence in Catholic Education Award recognizes teachers from across Alberta who have done an exemplary job in preparing youth to grow into outstanding Catholic citizens.
LCSD deputy superintendent Pamela Guilbault said, “Sherry motivates students to learn because of her love for teaching. Further to that, she achieves this through a sense of joy and empathy, always treating students with dignity and respect, as precious children of God.”
Depner, or Mrs. Sherry as the kids call her, wears a couple of hats in LCSD. She’s an English-language learner (ELL) support teacher for the district and a literacy intervention teacher at Notre Dame Elementary School.
When school is in session, she starts her day at Notre Dame Elementary School where she has rotating groups every 30 minutes of students who come for literacy support. Then, she “hits the road to any school that needs me to do ESL intake.”
“I meet with families of ELLs who maybe just moved to our district and then I do an intake screening with the children. Then I meet with the support team at the school to let them know where they are with reading, literacy, and writing skills,” she detailed. “Then they devise a plan moving forward so that the student can have the best start possible.”
After watching her mother teach for 30 years, Depner knew it was the profession for her.
“She always fought for the underdog. I watched her do that always and I saw her shed tears and triumph with the kids when it was good times. That’s where my passion came from.”
Teaching has allowed Depner to travel across the globe. Once she finished teacher’s college, she spent time in South Korea and completed an internship in England.
After teaching regularly in the classroom for a number of years, Depner realized her true passion laid with “helping students out of the norm.”
“I started working with inclusive ed, so children on the spectrum and working with speech therapy and under speech pathologists that I admired greatly. I fell in love with more intimate work of small groups and one-to-one with students,” she recalled.
It was when Depner’s travels brought her to northern Alberta that she met her husband, Kevin, and the pair moved to Bonnyville in 2003. Depner took some time off after having her two children, 14-year-old Klay and 13-year-old Sarah, and she realized LCSD was where she wanted to take her career.
“There’s a really beautiful sense of community, where people teach with compassion and passion, and I love it. I have my children in the system and I love to work in the system,” she exclaimed.
