A young girl once featured in the newspaper on her first day of school has worked extra hard to get to her graduation day.
Isabella Krueger, the subject of a two-part back-to-school series in the Western Wheel that captured her excitement to start kindergarten in August 2004, will be crossing the stage at Holy Trinity Academy later this month.
“I won’t lie, I’m a little scared,” said Krueger. “I’ve been in the same place for 12 years, and now it’s getting ready to go on to the next big thing.”
For her, the next big thing includes moving to Barry’s Bay, Ont., where she intends to study history and earn a degree in anthropology and museum studies at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom Academy. From there, she’d like to become a curator in a museum – wherever the wind takes her.
“I feel really called to the east coast, so I’d like to settle down there,” said Krueger. “But I’ll definitely miss the mountains and my family back here.”
It’s not just family and mountains she’ll miss. Krueger said the people she’s met and opportunities she’s had at HTA have been incredible, from being in musical productions to travelling with the band to Vancouver and Cuba.
She’s also been an advocate with the Youth Champions, an outreach branch for the Sheldon Kennedy Advocacy Centre that empowers high school students to be ambassadors of the centre, providing a listening ear for students who may need a little help.
“The whole idea of Youth Champions is to promote the centre, and to be kind of that step between, if one of our peers is having a problem but they don’t want to talk to an adult,” said Krueger. “We’re not counsellors, so there’s a lot of things legally we can’t do, but we’re going to be that comfort.”
Krueger will miss having her parents close at-hand when she forgets something at home, if she wants the keys to the car or needs a lunch. Both Stephanie and Jason Krueger are teachers at HTA.
She said it’s been interesting attending the high school where her parents work.
“They are very involved in my life,” said Krueger. “They have tried, a little bit, to step back because I’m growing up.”
Sometimes that’s not such a bad thing. With her parents being teachers, they were able to identify a learning disability while Krueger was at HTA and get her the help she needed to succeed in her last three semesters.
School had always been difficult for Krueger, especially when it came to writing exams. She was tested early in her Grade 11 year.
“It’s just like something doesn’t connect,” said Krueger. “There’s something when I’m reading it, something doesn’t translate. The effort is there, but it’s just hard.”
With her parents’ help, she worked with school counsellors to set up education accommodations to make taking tests easier. Now, she writes in her own room, is given extra time to complete an exam, and has a reader so she can process the questions.
Within one semester, her grades had climbed from 60 and 70 per cent to 80 and 90 per cent, she said.
“Thanks to the amazing resources at the school, my marks went up by about 10 per cent all around,” said Krueger.
She’s not worried about starting university either. Once education accommodations are on your file, they transfer with you to post-secondary institutions, she said.
Her mom, Stephanie, said the learning disability became clear as her daughter got older.
“She was always an avid reader and always would go down to the library and enjoyed reading, but then she was having a hard time with some of her reading comprehension,” said Stephanie. “Or they would ask her to do a math question and she would miss a step in it. There was a disconnect between when we talked about things what she understood and what she was able to write down.”
It took a lot of hard work in addition to the education accommodations she was given, but Stephanie said identifying the problem helped Krueger not only succeed academically, but also boosted her self-confidence.
“She really is a poster child for how accommodations can help a student,” said Stephanie.
The confidence she gained helped her get past the worry and anxiety she once felt at school when she was concerned about not getting it, she said. But knowing how it feels when things aren’t quite right made her even better at her position with the Youth Champions, she said.
“We’re really proud of her,” said Stephanie. “You see her and you’re just proud of the young woman she’s become. It’s just so neat.”
She said the family might not be ready to let her go just yet, but they are preparing for the day Krueger leaves for Ontario and excited to see where she goes from there. As parents, the long-term goal should always be to prepare children to eventually leave the nest, said Stephanie.
“It’s really great to see your kids grow up to kind of become the people you hope they will become, to see them flourish and become who they’re supposed to be,” she said. “That’s a gift to watch that happen.”
It’s been a long time since that first newspaper feature and the first day of kindergarten, though Stephanie said it feels like no time has passed at all.
“That was so crazy, the pictures of her on the school bus,” said Stephanie. “She was so keen for school, she had been talking about it for two years.
“She’d always been ready for it, and now here we are 13 years later and she’s ready to get her feet wet in the wide world. It’s pretty amazing.”
