When Burnaby school district superintendent Gina Niccoli-Moen got her first job as a vice-principal at Cariboo Hill Secondary in the 1990s, her daughter Alexa was just 11 months old.
"Superintendent Niccoli-Moen's heart and the empathy that comes from it represent who she is to this board and to past boards," school board chair Bill Brassington said at her last public meeting this month. "This board has borne witness to her leadership; her leadership is about service; it's about making a positive impact and about leaving things better than how she found them.
Her family lived across the street, but that doesn't mean she and her three sisters were always on time for school. The teacher Niccoli-Moen doesn't remember the exact moment she decided she wanted to be a teacher, but it was sometime during her English degree at UBC.They came to Canada from Italy as kids, and her father was the first in his family to get a chance at a university education, eventually retiring as an elementary school principal in the Vancouver school district."Education for them was opportunity," Niccoli-Moen says.
She went back to school, SFU, to get her master's in administrative leadership and loved it, she says. Did she ever imagine, back when she was at Westridge Elementary, that she'd be superintendent one day?Her way of explaining the role to kids has been to say she is like a "giant principal" of the whole district – though some youngsters' impression that a superintendent is some kind of super hero sounds more fun.