Bob Sharp
Bob Sharp attended the University of Alberta where he was a top athlete.1) He came to the Yukon as the principle of the Ross River school in 1968. Construction on the Faro mine and town started that year, and the school tripled in Sharp’s time to more than ninety students. Sharp started a Kaska language program in the school and also coached cross country skiing.2)
Bob coached wrestling and the Ross River team won all their matches against the older FH Collins team in Whitehorse. He took the team to competitions in Alaska and other places in Canada.3) From 1972 to 1976, Sharp lived in Old Crow and coached cross-country skiing and some wrestling. In 1976, he became the vice-principle of Whitehorse Elementary and started coaching wrestling there. He expanded his coaching skills by taking athletes to summer training camps at Sion Fraser University and Jasper, Alberta. He was two years in New Zealand where he continued to coach. He developed athlete training journals for cross-country skiing, curling, and soccer. He helped develop a protocol to allow male coaches to coach female athletes that allowed women into the sport. His daughter, Erica Sharp, became a world medallist.4)
Bob Sharp coached Yukon athletes at the Arctic Winter Games, Western Canada Summer Games, Canada Summer Games, and National Championships between 1968 to 2002. He was inducted into the Yukon Sport Hall of Fame in 2002.5)
In the late 1970s, Yukoners were concerned that rural students had limited options and poorer educational outcomes. Bob Sharp was a rural principal at the time, and he was seconded twice to study the issue. His first study, “Rural Students in Urban schools,” was published in 1979 and it tracked the progress of students who changed schools to further their education. It found that a substantial proportion were unsuccessful in their goal. Three of his important recommendations were that a scrutinizing committee be appointed, that student accommodations be replaced by a housing allowance, and that small secondary schools should be built in rural communities. By 1985, six rural schools were offering Grades 11 and 12 and every rural school offered programming for one or two grades higher than they had in 1979. His report was criticized for defining achievements in urban/rural terms rather than cultural, thus helping to obscure a perceived failure by the Department of Education to provide adequate education for Yukon’s Indigenous students. The government did not keep records relative to students’ cultural background. A commission, struck in 1985, had a mandate to analyse educational barriers for First Nations people and make recommendations for changes in policy and practices. The original three commissioners, including Bob Sharp, resigned and were replaced after they cited internal difficulties.6)
In 1997, Bob Sharp received a Prime Minister’s Award for Teaching Excellence for his Experiential Science 11 program at F. H. Collins Secondary School. Each semester included more than thirty field days plus two days each week working in college science labs. In four years, attendances averaged ninety-five percent. More than a third of his students were on the honour roll and another third improved their grades from Grade 10 by more than ten percent. Sharp based admission on attitude as well as marks.7)
During his career, Sharp was the Director of Curriculum Development, Regional Superintendent, Projects Coordinator, Research Coordinator, and school principal. He has received many awards including the Hillary Award for teaching Innovation and the Yukon’s Innovative Teacher’s Award. He placed activities from his Experiential Science 11 program on a website so others may use the community-based studies. He conducted a long-term study following students for ten to twenty years after they left high school. After he retired, he worked part time as an Experiential Educator with the Yukon Department of Education.8)
An avid gardener, Sharp grew a garden in Ross River and Old Crow and experimented with greenhouse designs at his farm outside of Whitehorse. He has been teaching lessons on how to build cold climate greenhouses at Yukon College since the mid-1990s. He and his son sell a six-piece greenhouse kit that has an automated watering and venting system, but Sharp would prefer that gardeners build their own.9)