About Our School
Dr. Freda Miller School opened in the fall of 2020 to serve the communities of Evergreen and Walden. In its inaugural year as a kindergarten through Grade 4 school, it had 16 classes including our HUB on-line classrooms accommodating 256 students. Today, Dr. Freda Miller School serves 363 students from kindergarten to Grade 5 in 16 classes. Dr. Freda Miller School is an inclusive environment celebrating cultural diversity, unique learning differences, collaboration, and innovation. At Dr. Freda Miller School, we take a land-based learning approach that incorporates Indigenous knowledge systems alongside traditional western ways of knowing. We are influenced by design-thinking, inquiry-based and Reggio-inspired approaches to teaching and learning, and celebrate holistic approaches to child well-being and achievement. Bear serves as both model and teacher for the school, representing courage, strength, perseverance, and care for and protection of others. Our mission is to provide an environment for learning that encourages children to take risks, make mistakes, learn, and grown in safe spaces. It is our collective goal to improve student learning through the design of inclusive, engaging and culturally responsive learning tasks both in the classroom and out on the land. Together – as educators, staff, community, families and students – we work to ensure that academic excellence, citizenship, belonging, and identity are at the core of all we do.
About Our School's Name
Dr. Freda Miller is a cell and molecular developmental neurobiologist at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children and professor at the University of Toronto, as well as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
She has made seminal scientific discoveries over the course of her career. Her discovery of stem cells in the second layer of the skin has provided the conceptual basis for using skin as a major source for genesis of human stem cells. The stem cells she discovered are critical for the repair of injured skin.
At the same time, Dr. Miller discovered new mechanisms determining whether nerve cells live or die, findings that initiated new fields of research and that have major implications for our understanding of neurodegenerative disorders.
Dr. Miller has made significant contributions to understanding how stem cells build the brain during normal development and how this goes awry in neurodevelopmental disorders such as autism. This led to her recent discovery that the commonly used diabetes drug metformin can be used to promote repair of the injured brain.
These outstanding discoveries have been widely recognized within the scientific community, and have led to clinical trials for therapies that “wake up” our own stem cells to repair the injured brain and skin.
Dr. Miller is a proud alumna of the Calgary public school system. She obtained her PhD in Medical Sciences from the University of Calgary. She maintains strong ties to Calgary, which is still home to most of her family. She lives part time in Canmore.
