‘The loss of a 16-year-old soul’ haunts his former teacher
The circumstances don’t matter to Mark Wasyluk.
The fact that his former student, 16-year-old Chance Gauthier, was shot to death shortly after midnight in a dark alley, the police statement that he “frequented” downtown, the speculation this fuelled — none of that changes how Wasyluk looks at it. It would have been just as devastating if it had been a car accident or illness. “It’s the loss of a 16-year-old soul,” he says.
And he can’t get that out of his head.
Wasyluk isn’t naive. He’s been a teacher for 30 years. And he won’t “sugarcoat” it. That would be disingenuous. It wouldn’t be fair. Chance wasn’t a model student, he said, whatever that is, he added.
“But there were moments when just his heart, his character working with young people, helping out his peers...There was lots of potential there.” Wasyluk and colleague David Koloff taught Chance at F. J. Brennan Catholic High School’s soccer academy two years ago. Chance was in Grade 9. Part of the exam was teaching soccer
skills to Grade 7 students. “Sir, could you make sure I get the problem kids?” Chance asked Koloff.
“Why?” asked Koloff.
“I don’t know,” Chance replied. “I just want to work with them.” He was enthusiastic, positive and patient. Sometimes, he purposely bungled a drill to show the kids that everyone makes mistakes.
“To me, what stood out was he didn’t allow kids to feel left out,” said Koloff. “If he saw a kid who was not confident executing the drill, he would go to that kid and show him how to do it, encourage him. He was trying to lead by example.”
Chance may have struggled with issues, said Koloff, “but for every demon he seemed to have, there was some sort of angelic quality because he would turn around and do something incredibly kind and incredibly thoughtful, always with the disenfranchised.
“Marginalized kids — Chance was drawn to them,” he said. “I think he saw a little bit of himself in them.”
He struggled with attendance and handing in assignments on time, said Wasyluk, who taught him geography in Grade 9 and history in Grade 10. Yet he was inquisitive and had a unique perspective.
“When we’d have a discussion, he’d see things from a different point of view,” he said. “Instead of taking down key points, he’d see something that was outside.” He excelled at getting Wasyluk off topic.
But his confidence didn’t match his ability and his heart, said Koloff.
“I remember he said to me one time, ‘Don’t worry about me, sir. I’m a lost cause.’”
Koloff replied that he doesn’t believe in lost causes. Everything changed on the soccer pitch. Chance was always the first student on the pitch. “Something happened to that kid when he stepped out into an athletic arena,” said Koloff. “His passion for sport was a pure joy for him. He was a very gifted athletic kid.”
He also played broomball, lacrosse, football, badminton and basketball. He bowled and went fishing.
But he never boasted, said Koloff.
“It wasn’t his thing to try to impress everyone. He deflected praise. It was almost like he wasn’t comfortable with it. There was genuine humility.” His circle of friends would all say the same thing, said Koloff. He was loyal and he was fun. “He was a spirited kid with a lot of energy, a lot of passion for what he was doing,” he said. Wasyluk and Koloff recalled a field trip to Chicago to see the United States play Costa Rica in the Copa America, a major soccer tournament. “Chance, come up and walk with me,” Wasyluk called to him as the group walked to Soldier Field. “We had some nice conversation, you know, private things about stuff, what he could possibly do.”
Then Wasyluk asked him to run to the back of the group and make sure everyone was there. “Yeah, sir, no problem,” Chance said.
When a band from Costa Rica took the stage, Chance was the first up there, dancing with an American flag painted on his face. Wasyluk and Koloff remember him looking down at them, waving for them to come up.
“He just really embraced the atmosphere,” said Koloff. “He just fully immersed himself in the experience.”
The group also met the University of Notre Dame soccer coach and trained on the pitch in Indiana.
Wasyluk recalled the coach’s message about the importance of not only academics and the team but community.
“It was about the importance of a complete circle,” he said. “You teach the wholeness of the boy. It comes back to we can’t dismiss students for whatever reason.”
Chance was a typical kid in many ways, said Wasyluk. Every teenager can feel marginalized in some way.
“It’s tough growing up,” he said. “We always talk about how we have to keep that in mind, all of us, society as a whole. It’s parents, the community, neighbourhoods, peers. Obviously, education is part of it.
We read things or we hear things, and we think of the negative, he said.
“But I like to think of the positive things he contributed.” We’re not naive, said Koloff, “but when we’re dealing with those kids, and Chance in particular...we always accentuated the positive. We celebrated the goodness in him. We made sure he recognized the goodness in him. My concern with him was always trying to build his selfbelief.”
How does anyone end up in a bad situation? Wasyluk asked. “Life’s made up of a whole bunch of small choices that can have large consequences,” he said. “It’s turning left instead of right.”
He refuses to point blame. “You have to look at society as a whole and the difficulties that young people face every day,” he said. “It’s society that fails.” The murder of a 16-year-old high school student should make everyone think, he said. If it doesn’t, “then we’re failing ourselves, let alone somebody else.”
Said Koloff, “There were a lot of people invested in (Chance), who spent a lot of time and energy rooting for the kid, trying to help the kid, as we do with every kid. A lot of people behind the scenes are grieving for him.”