BCBusiness

bcbusiness.ca January 2015 BCBusiness 63 In the meantime, the lack of person- alization in the public system is in part what causes parents to turn to private schools. Questions about an education system's overall quality can be partly answered by comparing averages across jurisdictions. But education "equity" can also be understood as "mediocrity" and averages don't speak to experiences of individual children who fall outside the norm. Consider, for example, Rick Moore's story. He and his wife remortgaged their home and forwent vacations in order to put their severely dyslexic son Jeffery in private school after the North Van- couver School District closed a special- ized program for children with special needs. They sued, arguing that the prov- ince failed to fulfill its legal obligation to provide free, public education to all children. Finally, in 2012, they won in the Supreme Court of Canada and the North Vancouver School District was ordered to reimburse private school tuition and tutoring fees (which came to over $100,000 with interest); Jeffery was awarded $10,000 in damages. The pro- gram was eventually reopened in North Vancouver, although the provincial sys- tem itself was not held liable. Jeffery, now 27, is a successful plumber. Moore believes his legal battle reveals a lot about why private schools are f lourishing. "When people hear 'private school', they think of Crofton House or St. George's, but there is a whole category of schools that exist because the public system can't or won't teach children like my son," he says. "The public system is really good at teaching the kind of kids who are round pegs in round holes, but they have a difficult time helping the square pegs." While the disability movement helped establish the independent school sector in the 1950s (see "Chil- dren With Disabilities in B.C. Schools," opposite), a child doesn't need to be severely dyslexic to be a "square peg," as Moore puts it. Lisa Pozin's son Rylan was held back a year for being disruptive. Teachers warned her that he wasn't developing emotionally at the pace of other children his age, but Pozin suspected that the problem wasn't her son's development but that the traditional school, which requires students to be quiet and compliant, wasn't a good fit for the overactive boy. She placed him in Madrona School, a one-room school where children learn at their own pace in an environment with children of multiple ages. Rylan, now seven, is studying math at a level beyond what children his age study in public school. Eric O'Donnell, a long-time teacher who took over Madrona School with his wife Judy in 2010, believes the public system "hopelessly mishandles" chil- dren like Rylan. Madrona specializes in educating "gifted" children, a term used by educators to describe children in the 97th percentile intellectually. Despite (or perhaps because of ) their brainiac status, gifted children some- times struggle with their behaviour. "We get a lot of kids who have been absolutely crushed by the public sys- tem and are in effect de-schooled," says O'Donnell, whose grown son is gifted. "They have had such profoundly bad experiences that they are expecting a bad experience." B.C. is very good at educating a par- ticular sort of student: those who can sit still and focus in a class of 25. But for children like Rylan Pozin and Jef- fery Moore, who don't fit into the aver- age, school can have disastrous effects on their self-esteem. Our schools may be beautiful cashmere sweaters, but they're one-size-fits-all. So is a private school education worth it? If your child is a round peg, she'll probably do just fine no mat- ter which of B.C.'s generally excellent schools she attends. Parents of square pegs, on the other hand, will have to wait and see whether a new six-year contract negotiated between the gov- ernment and the B.C. Teachers' Feder- ation, with its promised $400-million fund to address class size and composi- tion, will have any effect. In the meantime, kids—typically quick to pick up on conf lict among adults—sense what's going on. As Tracey Axelsson's daughter, decidedly a square peg, proclaimed just weeks after starting at Westside School: "Hey, Mom, I'm not the weirdest kid in class anymore!" ■ relationships between teacher and student are an essential founda- tion of learning. "When a student has the security of an attachment, the mind is open to absorb new informa- tion," explains junior school principal Ciara Corcoran. "It also encourages students to look to their teachers for direction with regard to values, iden- tity and positive choices rather than looking to peer attachments for all decision-making." Repeated research has shown that one of the strongest indicators of later life success (on out- comes from income to divorce rates) in both the K-12 and in higher educa- tion is whether a student reports they had a teacher who cared about them. At WPGA's senior school, person- alization applies to everything from tailoring timetables to suit students' needs to employing innovative assess- ment tools to help students progress at their own pace rather than at the pace of their cohort. If a student falls behind, teachers know them well enough to identify the problem early. Much of what distinguishes WPGA boils down to resources. Conversa- tions among enlightened educators in the public system, both at the school and ministry level, revolve around issues like personalization. Figuring out how to teach not only basic lit- eracy and numeracy but also the so- called 21st century skills (things like character, collaboration and com- munication, which WPGA delivers so well) is at the heart of current cur- riculum reforms. But this is a heck of a lot easier to achieve with the advan- tage of specialist teachers, ubiquitous technology and teacher training. Public school districts receive about $7,800 per student for operations (not including capital expenditures) from government. Private schools receive up to half of that amount in government subsidies—in addition to the $10,000 to $20,000 parents pay annually. In short, policymakers will need to invest more in specialist teachers and teacher training if they hope to make personalization a real- ity in public classrooms. In the meantime, the lack of per- sonalization in the public system is in part what causes parents to turn Public schools don't educate children with developmental abilities because it is widely believed that they cannot learn. so parents of disabled children start to set up their own independent schools. Premier bill bennett begins subsidiz- ing independent schools—giving schools up to 35 per cent of public school funding per student—and enrollment grows consistently over the next decade. Disability activists, going against the thinking of the 1950s, now push for disabled students to be educated in regular classrooms instead of at isolated specialized schools. Private school growth slows over the next decade as disabled students are integrated into the public system. Then-education Minister christy clark removes the b.c. Teachers' Federation's right to negotiate class size and composition, which teachers argue hurts students with special needs. Growth in private school enrollment speeds up again, with the portion of b.c. students in private schools increasing from nine to 12 per cent over the next decade. The decade-long legal battle over class size and composition comes to a head during the teachers' strike. The deal that ends the strike includes $400 million to hire specialized teaching aides and limit the number of special needs children assigned to each teacher. The supreme court of canada will consider whether the b.c. government illegally removed the bcTF's right to bargain class size and composition back in 2002. Rick Moore, parent of a severely dyslexic son, compares the history of disabled children in b.c. schools to the closing of mental health institution riverview Hospital. "inclusion, even though it was the right thing to do, was never sufficiently funded," he says. "i'm still cynical about whether the government is sincere about making inclusion of disabled children work."

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