In May 2026, the Lakehead District School Board found itself suddenly without a chair. The current chair submitted her resignation, citing personal reasons. Receiving her letter at a closed meeting, the trustees turned to the man who had held the gavel before: Ron Oikonen, 84, first elected in 1988, and chair once already from 2000 to 2007.
For taking up the chairmanship again — and for nearly four decades of service — the Superior Sentinel names him our Person of the Month.
Consistent Leadership
Born and raised in Thunder Bay, Oikonen was first elected as a Lakehead District School Board (LDSB) trustee in November 1988, aged 47. Over the past 38 years, he has been a constant, steadying presence for students, educators, and parents alike.
Through decades of shifting provincial policy and curriculum, Oikonen has been one of the board's longest-tenured voices. He previously served as the Board Chair from December 2000 to December 2007.
Showing Up for Students
Michael B. Currie, a former Hammarskjold High School student, recalls Oikonen turning up to help when asked:
"I first met Mr. Oikonen at Hammarskjold High School in Fall 2000, when he volunteered to judge an evening debate competition. At the time, I and my fellow students were organizing the event on our own. Despite being given very little notice, he participated as one of our judges. His involvement gave the entire tournament a crucial layer of official respectability, which ultimately ensured the Ontario Student Debating Union (OSDU) formally recognized our winners at the provincial level. More than two decades later, I’d like to say a belated: thank you very much."
A Voice for the North
While his name is most associated with the chair's gavel, Oikonen's day-to-day work as a trustee has centred on a straightforward goal: making sure every student receives an education that prepares them for life beyond high school. In his own words, his aim is to ensure all students "are prepared for life after secondary education, whatever path they choose." Within the board he sits on the Audit Committee and serves as an alternate on both the Student Transportation Services of Thunder Bay Committee and the Suspension Appeal/Expulsion Hearing Committee.
He has been equally outspoken about protecting the role of locally elected trustees, particularly for a region as distinct as Northwestern Ontario. In November 2025, Queen's Park passed Bill 33, the Supporting Children and Students Act, which expanded the education minister's authority over school boards — including the power to place a board under provincial supervision. Oikonen has argued that it is local people who best understand the needs of their own students and schools, and that the challenges facing a northern board differ sharply from those in southern Ontario.
Oikonen has stated that this current term will be his last as a trustee, which will end after the October 2026 school board elections.
Deep Roots in the Lakehead
Oikonen is part of a large extended family descended from Finnish pioneers who arrived in Thunder Bay in the early 20th century; his grandfather William Oikonen (1883 - 1966) migrated from Karvia, Finland and founded Oikonen's Taxi. His father Allan Oikonen (1917 - 1962) was a partner in Oikonen's Taxi. His family were longstanding members of Bethel Lutheran Church (which existed from 1934 - 2021).
Long before he ever sat at the board table, the grain elevators that line Thunder Bay's harbour loomed over Oikonen's childhood — quite literally. As a boy returning from his grandparents' camp at Pebbly Beach on 7 August 1945, he came down Hodder Avenue to find fire trucks everywhere after one of Port Arthur's enormous grain elevators had exploded (it was Saskatchewan Pool Elevator No. 5, later designated Pool 4B). A few years later, at noon on 24 September 1952, he was walking home for lunch from Shuniah School. He watched a mushroom cloud climb over the waterfront; with the whole country talking about the atomic bomb at the time, he and his classmates momentarily thought the worst had come — before learning it was another grain-dust explosion. When he later went to work in the elevators, some of the men alongside him were survivors of those very blasts.
Oikonen joined Saskatchewan Wheat Pool in 1961 and stayed for 36 years, retiring in 1997. He began as a clerk in the Pool's downtown administrative office in the Whalen Building, back when every incoming rail car had to be figured by hand and converted from pounds into bushels on a comptometer, a key-covered calculating machine he still owns and can make work. Over the decades he rose to head of the shipping desk and finally to lead grain accountant, coordinating with Lake Shippers, the railways and the Canadian Grain Commission to keep grain moving through what was then the busiest grain port in the country. At its height, the Pool ran some ten or eleven Thunder Bay elevators employing close to 1,900 people; by the end of his career, his office had moved right into the Pool 7A elevator, and computerization, automation and metric conversion had transformed the work beyond recognition.
In a 2011 interview with Nancy Perozzo of Friends of Grain Elevators, Oikonen explained that the grain trade was a logistics function that required coordination and reliability to keep a sprawling operation moving, since any one breakdown could back up the whole harbour. Day after day, Oikonen's job was to make the pieces fit: the cars on the rails, the boats at the berths, the inspectors' grades, the Pool's books. He carried that same instinct from the Pool 7A elevator to the board table. Trusteeship, like grain accounting, is mostly invisible when it's done well — balancing competing demands, holding an institution steady, making sure the next shipment, or the next graduating class, gets where it's going. So when the Lakehead board lost its chair in May 2026 and needed a steady hand, it already knew whose to reach for.
For nearly four decades of service and his deep roots in the city, we're glad to name Ron Oikonen our Person of the Month.
