B.C.’s longest-serving school trustee retires after serving 41 years on Surrey board

B.C.’s longest-serving school trustee, Laurae McNally from the Surrey school board, is saying goodbye to the position she has held almost consecutively since 1980.

The longtime trustee has seen many changes throughout her time, including transformations at schools, fighting for more funding and doing her favourite thing of all, spending time with schoolchildren.

“I’ve seen 28 ministers of education, five superintendents, six secretary treasurers — I’ve seen a lot,” McNally said, sitting upstairs at the Surrey school district building. “One of the neatest things was when we decided to make secondary schools. We used to have juniors and seniors schools but I think that was one of the best consultations we had because we had a good turnout of people who were frank and we actually listened.”

McNally served a total of 41 years on the Surrey school board, with a five-year break in the middle to focus on her family and career as an optician.

Education was always of great importance in McNally’s home growing up in Penticton before moving to Surrey, then eventually White Rock. But the longtime trustee was involved in education advocacy long before she ever served on the board.

McNally saw many things change, but one issue never went away.

“We had a huge overcrowding problem at Earl Marriott and my kids went there. They had no lunchroom so they ate their lunch on the floor in the halls every day, but we didn’t have parent groups at high schools at the time,” she explained.

She and other parents would speak to MLAs often and even went to Victoria. The following year, 1980, was an election year and every one of her peers told McNally to run, and so she did. When she first started, the term was only two years and McNally served on four, for a total of eight years in Surrey before taking a break after moving to White Rock.

She never thought she would come back, let alone stick around this long.

“It was all because of Gordon Hogg, it was all his fault,” McNally said, referring to the former White Rock mayor. “I was working at that time in Vancouver and I came home one night and they were all sitting there in the lobby of my building. I thought, ‘What are you doing here?’ but then I realized, ‘Oh God, it’s October!’ They wanted to come in and they had all of this paperwork for me. I finally said, ‘I’ll run if no one else runs.’ ”

And that’s exactly what happened. That year, in 1993, McNally was acclaimed for the first of three times in her long career.

Difficulties and frustrations still arose for McNally throughout her trustee career. In particular, how much times have changed politically, she said.