A prolific Okotoks artist is stepping back from his role as a full-time teacher after 20 years in the classroom.
“I just wanted to teach kids in the way that I wished I was taught,” said Paul Rasporich, who spent much of his career in the Foothills School Division.
At that time of his June 30 interview, he pointed out he had only been retired for approximately 12 hours.
“I feel like I set out what I wanted to do, to keep kids in school,” he said. “Not all kids are academic, not all kids are athletes, and the high school experience can be traumatic.
“I just wanted to create a safe haven for those kids, and I think I achieved that.”
Rasporich recalled the moment his paths as an artist and an educator began to intertwine in Grade 1.
“I’m at a school in Thunder Bay for Grade 1, and I’m kind of a dreamy kid,” Rasporich said. “I’m a kid that I would consider an art kid now, and not an academic type.
“The teachers were doing watercolours that day and this picture she sees me working on, she holds it up in front of the class and she says, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Paul is an artist.’”
At that moment in the interview Rasporich held out the very painting his mother held onto over the years, inarguably a Grade 1 student’s rendition of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
“That moment was pivotal in my life because she identified me as an artist,” he said. “She just said it without question, so I always thought that okay, I guess I’m an artist.
“So I’ve been recreating this experience for kids now for the last 20 years and holding their work up in classes and giving them that same leg up that I got, confidence-wise."
Before he became a teacher Rasporich had already become an accomplished artist, with his recent body of work Assemblé recently having been exhibited at the Calgary Central Library after years in the making with the National Ballet Company in Toronto.
Starting at Foothills Composite High School in 2002, Rasporich taught there until moving to the Calgary Arts Academy, teaching grades 1 and 2 there for a couple years, giving him a chance to teach younger students.
Following that, he returned to the FSD to teach at Oilfields High School in Black Diamond.
There he, with the empowerment of principal and former Comp teacher Scott Carey, revived a program to support Indigenous students.
“Scott Carey and I restarted the Indigenous facilitator role to basically support Indigenous students in the school division,” Rasporich said.
Originally called the First Nations, Métis, Inuit facilitator role, the program had been dormant for about 10 years at the time, and after its success at Oilfields Rasporich said it was adopted division-wide.
“Now it’s a very important part of the Foothills School Division,” he said.
The next step in his journey brought him back to the elementary levels, empowering kids much the same way he originally was.
“It was a continuation of the work I did in Calgary Arts Academy, and what I wanted to show everyone is that the kids are capable of so much,” Rasporich said.
Those years brought with it the COVID-19 pandemic, however, which created other hurdles.
“It’s been good, but COVID was very challenging,” Rasporich said, adding he had contracted a harsh variant himself early on. “But we all came through it and Blackie School is freshly renovated now, it’s nice.”
As the pandemic moved classes online, the artist began a series of YouTube videos called Art with Raspo, where he would engage in artistic study of a specific subject — typically animals.
One of his first students, Jamie Irving, took his first year of art classes in 2002.
“High school wasn’t always everyone’s favourite, but his was my first class of the day so I always wanted to go to school,” Irving said. “There’s the odd teacher that just always wants you to be better and do better.
“I never thought I was good at art, but I did some really great artwork in Paul’s class; he had high standards but he would give you the tools to succeed.
“He was just always positive, always happy, always drinking Dr. Pepper Slurpees.”
That positivity carried with Irving later in life.
“I found his approach to teaching just always generated positive outcomes for me,” said Irving, who now works as a social worker.
“Just an amazing teacher, someone that I still thought about after school, like going back to college which wasn’t even art related.”
Retirement from the education system doesn’t mean Rasporich will stop working entirely.
“It enables me to have my skills and interests used in the most suitable way,” he said.
His grandmother, Irene Matson, was the one who pushed him to go back to school to be a teacher, a dream Rasporich said she once held for herself, but never followed.
While being of Finnish descent, Rasporich made an effort as an artist and teacher to connect with Indigenous cultures and help make the school system and society inclusive for Indigenous students.
“That’s my hope that we can dissolve some of the barriers and discord and division that exist right now,” Rasporich said. “I would like to see all the children together.
"We’ve lived apart from the Indigenous people for so long. It’s an apartheid.”
He cited what the Honourable Murray Sinclair said of the system.
“There are still a lot of vestiges of residential schools, there’s still cruelty in our system,” Rasporich said. “A lot of the problems created in residential schools, they need to be solved in the educational system.”
Planning to visit his relatives in Finland, who are also teachers, he hopes to exchange ideas.
“Their system is a lot farther along than ours is," he said. "But I feel our system could be greater because we’re farther along on the process of reconciliation with the Indigenous people; they’re not as far along with the Sami people of Finland.”
He hopes to continue to use art to create those bridges.
“Art is a wonderful expression," he added. "Everyone appreciates art and nature."
