Student graduates from St. Catharines university – at age 85!

It’s never too late.

Yesterday (June 13), 85-year-old Jacqueline Wilson walked across the convocation stage at Brock University and collected her Bachelor of Education (BEd) Specialist degree with a focus on special education.

It’s a career path she’s followed all her life. The simple fact is she didn’t really need this degree. She just plain wanted it.

“My bucket list is now complete,” she said. “My lifelong dream has finally come true.”

But again, it’s not like Wilson needed the paper – she was teaching special needs children long before others.

Wilson began as a teacher with the Hamilton-Wentworth Catholic District School Board in 1954 at the age of 17 – a time when teachers didn’t need degrees. After Grade 13, she took a one-year teacher education program and a year later, she was teaching a class of 40 elementary school students.

In 1985, the Ontario government under Premier Bill David passed the Ontario’s Education Amendment Act, which then required school boards to provide special education programs for special needs students. Prior to that, programs for special needs kids were hit and miss.

Wilson was one of just two teachers in the HWCDSB chosen to work with special needs children. With a special needs niece, Wilson went on to become a general learning disabilities class teacher, special education resource teacher, speech correction teacher and assessment remediation teacher before retiring in 1997.

In total, she taught for 24 years and spent 16 of those in the special education field. She started at Brock part-time around her teaching schedule in 1982 as a part-time student. By 1990, she was just one course shy of finishing her program but the course she wanted wasn’t available.

However, she faced health issues with her husband, who eventually passed in 2019 after 60 years of marriage, and after that, she made the decision to finish what she started at Brock.

She said the anxiety and stress she felt in returning to school reminded her of the students she championed for most of her career. “I am a great advocate for children with learning disabilities and multiple exceptionalities.”

In the end, family got her through. “My family was extremely supportive,” Wilson said of her husband and four daughters, three of whom followed in her footsteps to become educators, including one special education resource teacher.

And on Monday, they crossed the stage to pick up that long-missing piece of paper.