
When students at Peter Greer Elementary School last week broke open a time capsule filled with fliers, photos, newspapers and other bits and bobs from the year 2000, a letter filled with insight and wisdom was within.
It was dated January 2025 and addressed the students at Peter Greer, who had yet to be born when it was penned by then-superintendent Ron Rubadeau.
He talked of the time he was in, the past he'd emerged from and offered hopes for a "kinder, gentler" world than the one he'd lived in.
Rubadeau, unfortunately, didn't get to see the letter revisited. He died Aug. 3, 2022. He was 73.
Here's the text of the letter in full.
To Peter Greer Elementary Students
Greetings:
Over the twenty-five years that this letter has been maturing in your ‘millennium box,’ I hope that the world has been kind to your parents and grandparents, and that you are growing up in a kinder and more gentle world than that of my youth.
As I wrote this letter, war rages on every continent of the world, and despots struggle to control the lives, if not the destiny of the young and innocent.
While we are wealthier than at any time in our past, it is still a harsh fact that those of us with one pair of shoes, a roof over our head, and one meal a day are more fortunate than 98 per cent of the world’s population. But it is not that the world is black in the year 2000; it is that there remains much to be done to make the world a better place.
Many of the youth of 2000 are now grandparents in the year 2025. As students, they had a keen interest in the environment and worked hard to preserve Kokanee fish and the peregrine falcon.
The dedicated themselves to helping the handicapped and those less fortunate than themselves. They had a vision of a Canada that was free or racism, greed, hatred and poverty. Many students took a second language in school so that they could become citizens of the world.
In the last five years of the 20th century, Canada was voted the best nation to live in by the United Nations. Within Canada, no place was finer than the Okanagan Valley.
If this is still the case in 2025, it is because the vision that your parents had for the future came true; a vision based on hard work, respect and a belief in community. Listen to what they say and you too can make Canada an even better place in the next twenty-five years.
Sincerely,
Ron Rubadeau
Superintendent of Schools