Diligence and attention pay off

When our daughter was 2-1/2, my husband and I began to look for a Junior Kindergarten. We knew little about education—what to teach or when and how to teach it. But we knew what was important to us. We wanted a French education. We wanted a small class with plenty of personal attention. We wanted a strong curriculum beginning in the lowest grades.

We had both gone to private and public school, so both systems were familiar to us. But we graduated a long time ago and a lot had changed.

The two half-day Junior Kindergarten classes in our local public school had 26 and 29 students with one teacher and one assistant each. We also found the half-day Kindergarten programs lacked a strong curriculum. We couldn’t imagine how our daughter would function in this environment, let alone learn anything.

I found a magazine that had advertising from all of the independent and private schools in Ontario. The choices seemed overwhelming, so I created a spreadsheet that summarized everything from the type of educational program to class size to whether there was after-school childcare. With the information organized, we began to understand the options and our short list emerged.

Then the real challenge began. We had to look at softer criteria, such as the quality of the teachers, the general environment and the school’s mandate. Only with open houses and daytime visits could we determine whether a school was a good fit.

The school was a long shot for us: It was small and not heavily advertised, so we didn’t know a lot about it. It was also far from our home. But we knew the school’s headmaster, Harry Giles, as a pioneer and innovator in education so we went to the open house.

The evening open house was routine until we spent some time with a lower grade schoolteacher, looking at the work the preschoolers were doing. As I turned the pages in the workbooks, I was speechless: I couldn’t believe a three-year-old was capable of accomplishing what I saw. A daytime visit confirmed what we had seen: The teachers were excellent, the environment was warm and caring, and the kids were doing work at a level we hadn’t thought possible.

In the end, the visits made our decision easy and even convinced us to enrol our daughter a year earlier then planned, to the Pre-K program, instead of waiting another year for JK.

We learned diligence and attention to detail when picking a school pay off: Even though the school we chose isn’t as well known as some other private schools, it’s a perfect fit for us. 3 years later, our daughter is entering Grade 2 and thriving, and our son has just completed the Pre-K programme. We couldn’t be happier.

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