St. George's School THE OUR KIDS REVIEW

St. George’s School is steeped in history, but its sights are set on the future. Founded in the quiet neighbourhood of Point Grey in 1930, it has seen the evolution of Vancouver into the world-class city it is today. And the school has seen its own trajectory grow alongside Vancouver, from its humble beginnings in a private home to its status as a world-class independent school.

True to Vancouver’s usual spring weather, rainfall marks the morning I arrive at St. George’s School — not heavy rain, but enough to draw out the fresh scents of the Pacific Spirit Regional Park forest surrounding the Senior School campus. The forest’s towering trees make even impressive buildings like those on St. George’s Senior School campus feel humble from the outside.

But the school is anything but humble. This is as true of its beautiful architecture as it is of its ambitions, which the school wears proudly. St. George’s School—or, as it’s often called, Saints—doesn’t want to be any ordinary school. It is driven by the vision of building young men to become impactful leaders and agile partners in and for their communities. Its proclaimed ambition is to “be an internationally significant school that will graduate young men with a global outlook to meet the challenges of a complex and rapidly changing world.”

In short, the school wants to shape not just the boys who attend, or even the local community, but the world in which we live. But to do that, they take a narrow focus. A phrase you’ll often hear from its staff spells their focus out perfectly: “Building fine young men. One boy at a time.” And the boys attending the school are certainly impressive.

In charge of giving me the tour of the Senior School isn’t a teacher or administration staff member—not even Director of Admissions Aaron Andersen, who otherwise introduces me to everyone I meet during my visit—but a student. This boy, a Grade 11 student, knows the school in and out, not only in its hallways and classrooms, but in its vast array of offerings.

Like many of the boys at St. George’s, he’s particularly interested in the variety of sports available to the students, taking time outside the large gym to enthusiastically show me the plaque bearing some of the school’s many accomplishments on the provincial and national stage (or, rather, sports field). Adorning the plaque are a variety of ties. Each tie represents a different sport, with the students able to distinguish themselves from the various co-curriculars they participate in through that little sliver of expression in their otherwise mostly uniformed outfits. But they aren’t cliques—most boys participate in several different activities. One student tells me he’s never bought a tie, but he now has more than he knows what to do with from all the different co-curriculars he has participated in over the years.

During our visit, a foyer is crowded with parents chatting and eating hors d’oeuvres. Normally, my student guide tells me, this space would be filled with things like ping pong tables, foosball, and other activities. “The boys love it,” he says, noting the foosball tables are almost always taken.

All around the foyer, students’ art is on display, demonstrating considerable talent. At the end of each school year, the school presents artwork from students in Grades 8 to 12. This year’s display, which was scattered throughout the foyer during our visit, reflects the creative talent that is nurtured at the school.

Later in the day, sitting across a table from me in his large office, where he’s correctly warned me the couch I’m about to sit on is hazardously comfortable, Head of School David Young says the school is in a state of transformation. They’ve recently published their 10-year strategic plan, which will bring the school through its 100th year to 2033.

Indeed, while St. George’s wears its history on its school uniform sleeve, in the bricks and mortar and dense wood structures of its buildings, and in the regal portraits of past headmasters hanging on the lunchroom walls, St. George’s is no relic of the past—it can be better described as a mix of tradition and innovation.

The first school building was a private residence, where author Douglas Harker, in his book The Story of St. George’s School for Boys, wrote that the school existed as “no more than a collection of boys” attending class and participating in games in “erstwhile sitting-rooms and bedrooms.” In photos of the school’s history, framed in the hallways of the secondary school, you can see remaining parts of that since-demolished residence on the exterior of some of the houses that now line the quiet streets of the West Point Grey neighbourhood.

While the original school no longer exists, St. George’s School still has a mix of history in its buildings, from the existing 1960s-built Senior School building to the Junior School campus a few blocks to the east. The latter is the kind of property you would expect to see more in a European countryside than in one of Canada’s largest urban centres. A granite castle built in 1911, which previously housed the Roman Catholic all-girls Convent of the Sacred Heart secondary school, the property was bought by St. George’s in 1979. Like the buildings, the school retains some of its history in its traditions. St. George’s School has lost its Anglican affiliation, but it has kept the tradition of a large Anglican ceremony to mark Remembrance Day, a reflection of the fact that some of the school’s first graduates were among those sent across the ocean to fight in the Second World War.

The Junior School property is relatively open in front, the stone structure facing rows of single-family houses across the street, but just about every other side of the Junior School property is lined with trees. While the space is expansive—including a playground and a full-sized soccer field—the tree lining behind the school leaves a cozy feeling that it’s insulated from the outside world. And that’s a common feeling around both campuses.

Vancouver, Andersen notes, is a world-class city, which is regularly ranked as one of the most livable cities around the globe, and which is a tourist destination much like Paris, London, Singapore, and Dubai, “One just needs to go and experience.” And St. George’s School is situated in a particularly special part of the city. The Senior School campus sits alongside a substation and a couple of small cul-de-sacs, a slice out of the forest between the University of British Columbia, and the city of Vancouver. Walk north, west, or south from any of the Senior School facilities and you’ll find a sample of Vancouver’s most famous offering: a large network of forest trails to wander and forget for a moment that you’re in a large city.

“It’s even better when you can actually live here,” Andersen says, adding for prospective students from abroad that attending St. George’s School would transition well into “incredible” post-secondary education opportunities in Canada.

In its nearly 100-year history, St. George’s has gone through phases. “I’m about to begin one,” Young says. “That phase will have a start and an end. And then I get to be part of a team that stewards the school for that moment, and we’ll pass that stewardship responsibility to the next phase. And we, ourselves, received the school from the last phase, and so on. Each phase is definable but not separate.”

The school today is “quite a distance” from what it was in the 1930s. “But you could very definitely follow the sequence. And that is our history here. It’s our traditions. And those are very important to people. And we really work hard to hold those as a sort of anchor,” Young says.

The thread that connects them comprises the six core values that define the school’s traditions: empathy, humility, integrity, respect, responsibility, and resilience. “Those, we are confident, would be reflective of who the community’s always been,” Young says.

When Young travels the world, he gets to see graduates from the 1970s to last year’s cohort, in places like New York, London, California, Hong Kong, and China, each alum acting as a time capsule for the St. George’s School of their era. And throughout, Young sees “definitely an entrepreneurial spirit”—not necessarily that they’re all entrepreneurs, but that they move through the world with their “front foot forward, willing to noodle with the problem, bring other people on board to figure it out, try, fail, try [again].”

“You meet these people, and their careers are not straight lines. But they’re very interesting, and as a result, often quite successful, success being defined in lots of different ways,” Young says.

St. George’s School’s phase with Young at the helm coincides, by “good timing,” with the completion of the school’s strategic plan last fall. And the plan seeks to channel the entrepreneurial spirit the school instills in its students. Nobody knows what the world will look like in 10 years—nor what educational needs will be in 10 years—but the school is taking an ambitious stab at what it might be. “We’d like to step into exploring what the future of learning might be. We see that in partnership with other agencies, post-secondary [schools], businesses, and not-for-profits. And what we want to do is work backwards from what we imagine a future society will need and wonder: Will that be where the future of work is? And if so, is that going to be the future of learning?” Young says.

To be so ambitious requires an understanding that you will get some of it wrong, and Young acknowledges this. But the school expects it will also prove prophetic in other areas. And when it finds areas that it believes it has developed a future path for education, the school wants to share this knowledge with other schools, tapping into its one-for-one philosophy, which Young sums up with “Every time a St. George’s boy benefits, who else equally benefits?”

But the school seeks out innovation not only in the ways students are educated but also in the infrastructure that makes up the school.

The new Senior School buildings are set to be state-of-the-art facilities. Their modern design, from Gensler Architecture, the firm behind Shanghai Tower and Facebook’s headquarters, emphasizes natural lighting with floor-to-ceiling windows; uses fresh air ventilation, rather than the recycled air in the existing building; and is eco-friendly, with a LEED Gold rating.

While the school is, indeed, a school first and foremost, St. George’s takes a holistic approach, with student life, residential life for boarding students, academic work, and co-curriculars integrating with one another.

Each grade has a head of grade, a system described as “a godsend” by science teacher Kathryn Murray Hoenig, who hadn’t experienced it in other schools prior to joining St. George’s. The head-of-grade teacher has a detailed understanding of each boy’s progress and challenges and co-ordinates with their teachers, coaches, counsellors, and parents to ensure that when hitches occur in a boy’s school life—Murray Hoenig gives the example of a boy who experiences mood changes with the drearier seasons—they can respond accordingly.

The school recognizes that what happens outside the classroom impacts the ability of students to learn in the classroom and vice versa, but it goes beyond that—it gets at the core of the kinds of young men the school is working to build.

St. George’s Associate Principal of Student Life Brian Lee boils the school’s culture down to a balance of excellence and care that strives to build character in the boys who graduate. The school sees student life not as a filler between classes, but rather as an intrinsic component of it. The student’s life isn’t just a series of classes, nor does he cease to exist outside the classroom. If the classroom is a brick, the space between and around class time is the mortar that holds it in place.

“Kids here really do strive to be the best version of themselves right across the board,” Lee says. “It’s a culture that puts character education—character development—at the forefront of our collective thoughts. And everybody in the community knows that we’re a school of character.”

Lee takes it back to the school’s favourite phrase, which is often repeated among students, staff, and parents: Building fine young men. While a high-achieving student may accomplish plenty in their life, Lee notes the school’s drive is for their fine young men to grow into old men who can look back on a life that had a positive impact on the world.

“So when a student walks across the stage, when we celebrate their graduation, what we’re celebrating is our mission: We build fine young men. And that’s very much about character. Individuals who are going to make a positive difference in their communities, and that’s a celebration of that,” Lee says.

Jamie Donnici, an English and drama teacher, says the school’s holistic approach to education is aimed not just at making students the best at what they do, but at building character. “What we’re focusing on here is helping these kids make friends, develop leadership skills, social skills, self-confidence, interact with other people,” Donnici says.

It would, of course, be impossible to talk about student life without acknowledging that St. George’s is an all-boys school. And while that may not be for every boy, students, staff, and parents at St. George’s School sing praises for this model.

Because the students aren’t dividing themselves into girls and boys, there aren’t girls’ activities and boys’ activities, nor is there one way of being a boy that contrasts with a single way of being a girl. Where boys may be more standoffish in mixed settings, teachers talk excitedly about how comfortable the boys are, slinging arms around one another’s shoulders and confiding in one another. And they’re more at ease opening up to their teachers.

“They’re very comfortable expressing themselves to you,” says Donnici, who credits not only the fact that it’s an all-boys school, but also the values that the school instills in the boys. That starts with the relationships the students have with their teachers, and it branches out into the school’s integrated system of care, from the head-of-grade system to their counselling resources and other pieces of the school’s social architecture. “That’s something we really emphasize here. And it’s built into the structure of our school.”

Teachers at St. George’s quote the common saying in academics: They aren’t teaching math; they’re teaching students. And the school doesn’t just say it—it is baked into St. George’s infrastructure.

Teachers have fewer classes to teach, but like the students, they are all required to take on some kind of extracurricular activity, be it coaching a team or leading a club. On top of teaching science, for example, Murray Hoenig helps run the science fair and oversees “a whole bunch of the science clubs”—as well as extracurriculars less entwined with her academics, like working front of house with the theatre program and helping with the yearbook.

“They see you differently and you see them differently,” says Steffen Tweedle, a math teacher who has been at St. George’s for 22 years and has two boys attending the school, with a third incoming.

“Teaching students in Socials 8 and then coaching them on the badminton team or overseeing them in their Model United Nations Club, teachers get to see students from all angles,” adds Jacklyn Lather, social studies teacher. “By seeing not only the students’ academic life, but how they interact in competitive environments and in social situations, teachers get a holistic vision of who a student is as a person.”

This integration of the students’ lives into an array of curricula and extracurricular activities creates a community environment, where teachers step into the role not just of educators but mentors. Students will reach out to a teacher and ask them to attend their recital or to go see their art displayed in the school, Lather notes.

“I would say it’s more the exception to the rule,” says Murray Hoenig, “that a student doesn’t have somebody out of our large staff that they can make a connection to.” And this is deliberate. Faculty will conduct periodic surveys of the student base to identify which teacher has a connection to each student. For the students that don’t have an existing connection, Murray Hoenig notes, staff will make an effort to build one.

And there are ample avenues for teachers to build relationships with students, from the classroom to co-curriculars and other programs.

One program is nestled somewhere between academics and traditional co-curriculars, like arts or sports: every student has to participate in an advisory group of 10 students and one teacher. In those groups, students meet once a week for at least half an hour to hold meaningful discussions on topical issues.

“So if we’re dealing with a topic around racism, or empathy, or we have a guest present who comes in to speak about Pride week, for example, we will use that small group setting … to distill, to break down the thesis of their presentation and have discourse around it,” Lee notes.

By having those kinds of conversations that go beyond typical academics or arts or sports co-curriculars, the teachers facilitating those conversations get to know the students in how they work through and reason with issues facing their community and beyond. And because it’s just 10 students to one teacher, there’s more engagement and opportunity for students to participate and ask questions.

The emphasis on teachers acting as mentors, Lee says, falls into a philosophy summed up by a saying the school often uses: Student life enriches the schooling experience of our students. “And so that’s ensuring a few things. Student life is about student engagement in the life of the school. So, are you involved in the activities, the breadth of activities that we offer? Are there opportunities for you, for students to connect with each other meaningfully to ensure that positive relationships occur?” Lee continues.

“Do adults in the building have an opportunity to mentor, to teach, to coach, to build positive relationships with the students? Because we know that in order for us to teach kids, to help them develop and grow, we have to know where they are in their learning, right?” Lee adds.

“We can’t just begin teaching them without knowing where they are. And how do you get to know where they are? Well, it’s through the engagement, through the activities, the opportunity to walk shoulder-to-shoulder with the students and have meaningful conversations that heighten our ability to teach and to help them develop and grow.”

“This is also key to breaking through cultural norms that teach boys that it’s a weakness to open up to others,” Lee says. “The school models openness and vulnerability for the boys through those relationships and mentorship, giving them a safe environment to be vulnerable and to make them know that it is a safe and caring space.”

The school strives to ensure safety not just in terms of physical safety, but also for their mental health.

“If they can’t make mistakes, if they’re afraid to make mistakes, if they’re afraid to be who they are, then I think we have a real challenge in being able to educate them and being able to work with them,” Lee says. “And so there are, again, intentional approaches to making sure that this is a safe place for every kid, and that they are without fear of being judged.”

Besides mentorship from teachers, the school is serious about counselling for its boys, with a well-resourced support system. Every student in St. George’s School has a personal counsellor and a university counsellor assigned to him. There are three full-time personal counsellors and four full-time university counsellors at the school. Lee, who started at St. George’s as a computer science teacher, worked as a counsellor at the school for nearly a decade before stepping into his current role, so he knows well the importance of counselling for boys of that age.

And Lee notes that the boys’ well-being is reflected back in their education. Not only does investing in counselling for the students improve the students’ lives, it also improves their ability to engage in academics.

“Students have challenges and there’s controversies and adversities they have to face, personal and social, that impede their ability to learn. So having a concentrated effort in our personal counsellors, for example, [supports] the students so that they can access the curriculum,” Lee says.

“I would say, for us, having such a focus outside of the classroom also supports what happens in the classroom and … heightens the overall experience of the students at the school, for sure. We have many levers in the school that are pulled to be able to enact the support and enrich the experience accordingly.”

The boarding residences are the gem of St. George’s School. That’s how Associate Director of Residential Life, Gillian Ani described it, and her conviction is palpable in the way she talks about the residences.

Located on the site of the Junior School campus, the residences are a modern apartment block nestled behind the old nuns’ residence and adjacent to the Junior School building and playground. The program generally houses in the area of 90 to 100 students in Grades 8 to 12. Currently, that figure sits at around 100, and they come from around the world—a lot come from Asia, along with others from Germany, Mexico, Finland, Rwanda, and more. In all, Ani says around 20 nationalities are represented in the boarding cohort of students.

The diverse range of backgrounds come together to form an exceptionally tight community. That community consists not only of the students but also over a dozen house parents—that is, teachers who also live in the residence—who also come with their own families. “It really feels like an extended family. The students who live together have really close relationships,” Ani says.

Where boarding schools are often in a suburban or rural area, removed from the city experience, Andersen notes that St. George’s School is located in Vancouver. “It’s so important not only for students to have an important education, but alongside opportunities to grow, mature, to be independent, to be connected with a wider world and community,” Andersen says. As a school in an urban environment, St. George’s School is able to provide that, being well-connected to everything the city has to offer—and it takes advantage of that setting.

The school requires active involvement from every student living in residence, and it’s hard to see why students wouldn’t want to be involved. Every weekend, the boarding students get to take advantage of the best local amenities and recreational activities Vancouver has to offer, from paintball and go-karting to watching movies in the theatre. And typically every other weekend the house takes students on an overnight trip. This could include rock climbing or mountain biking or, in the winter, hitting some of British Columbia’s world-class slopes for skiing and snowboarding. This last winter, Ani says, 35 students participated in the ski and snowboard program. “It’s a really engaged student body,” Ani adds.

While international students may sometimes struggle to fit in with the schools they’ve joined, as they are separated from past friend groups and may feel separated from their culture, Ani says St. George’s School works hard to ensure that’s not the case here. One boarding student we spoke to says living and studying together with students develops bonds quickly between those students, developing a strong sense of community. In fact, the work to integrate the boarding students and the day students often involves programs to get the day students feeling more comfortable joining the boarding students as the outsiders of that community. That includes allowing day students to sleep over on some nights and giving boarding students a pass for a friend to join on the weekend programming.

Besides the fun, the school seeks to ensure students in the boarding school learn a wide set of life skills. That includes running in-house workshops on things like cooking, laundry, sewing, and any variety of skills that are needed for the students to be able to take care of themselves when they move on into adulthood. And it pays off. “The students who buy into the program really can have an incredible experience challenging themselves, learning new skills, connecting with peers from different grade levels, learning some fundamental life skills,” Ani says.

The school also takes advantage of the boarding program to tap into students’ leadership skills. Students in Grades 11 and 12 are nominated for the leadership program and put through a rigorous selection process. Over the course of a month, leadership group candidates are asked to submit a resume and cover letter, and they go through interviews before the input is given by the existing student leadership team and the house parents (teachers who live in the residences) and being voted on by their peers.

And there’s a good reason for making the process rigorous—the student leaders in the residence take on a big role.

“They take on a really large portion, as well, of components of running the house,” Ani says. “They come back a week before all of the other students, and they have a whole orientation which includes things like planning out the year’s calendar and the major events, assigning students to rooms.”

They also interview all incoming students to find out more about them and determine who should be rooming with whom, take nonviolent communication training and suicide prevention training, do housework in the residence, and run the intramurals program. The residence leadership program has committees to run various aspects of the boarding program, including volunteering, recreation, and trip planning.

“One student’s really interested in sustainability, so he’s running a lot of workshops around that for the younger students,” Ani says. “So they each sort of choose an area of interest and work with their peers on planning programming, leading programming, getting students involved. And then they have regular leadership meetings and leadership retreats. So we work quite extensively with our leadership team.”

The school’s motto, Sine Timore Aut Favore, is ingrained in its environment. The Latin phrase means “Without fear or favour,” and is exemplified in how the school recognizes that students have diverse educational needs. Its flexibility does not mean favouring those who deviate from the norm. Indeed, the school sees it as quite the opposite. By addressing each boy’s unique needs and learning style, St. George’s provides a balanced educational experience for all students, not just those who excel within traditional learning environments.

“There’s a lot of acceptance for the students being at where they are and how they are. So if it’s something like yoga, we’ve got some kids who are borderline contortionists and those of us who struggle to get past our knees. But it’s yoga class, and that’s what we’re doing,” Murray Hoenig says.

That means working with kids to address areas where they struggle to reach past their knees and pushing them in areas where they’re borderline contortionists and where they can be more competitive and demonstrate their excellence.

“Our old headmaster said that every boy here deserves to be known and loved, and we take that really seriously here. So building relationships with the boys means that I’m teaching the content of math, but more importantly, I’m teaching the boys to think mathematically and to understand themselves in the world,” says Karyn Roberts, principal of the Junior School and Grade 7 math teacher.

“We grew up with this binary of math person/not a math person; good at math/bad at math. But math is about seeing patterns, and math is about thinking logically. Math is about systematically working through things, and there is a section of math that everybody is good at.”

Relational teaching means knowing students and being able to teach them in the way that works for them.

“So I have a group that’s highly competitive, and that means we’re going to play, we’re going to gamify math. Math is going to be a lot of physical games, and it’s going to be a lot of out-of-your-seat, walking around the room, racing each other, tied to basketball free throws, and whatever is in their world at the moment,” Roberts says

If a student is good at art, she may focus more on geometry with that student, looking at patterns and ancient tile designs from around the world. “There’s just lots of scope for creativity when you put the boys first,” Roberts notes.

Each teacher brings to the school their own background and approach to learning. The school isn’t a Harkness school, for example, though a number of teachers there employ the Harkness pedagogical method, according to Director of Learning Sam Johnston. The school also nurtures a mindset that is centred on inquiry—helping students to develop their natural curiosity by encouraging them not simply to look for the right answers, but also to be thoughtful and ask the right questions.

The school is aligned with B.C.’s curriculum, using the Ministry of Education’s framework for its courses and graduating students with a provincial diploma, but Johnston notes the school’s programming is “supplemented with additional experiential opportunities” and “quite rigorous work.”

The school also offers a wide selection of AP courses for those seeking advanced education in various subjects. In fact, the school offers among the highest number of AP courses in all of British Columbia, and Johnston says the uptake on those offerings is “significant.” While not all students take all APs, a lot of students will take at least one or two, with some taking more.

“The math program is particularly strong, with a handful of students at St. George’s School going so far through the AP math courses by Grade 11 that the school developed a custom course that would take the students further into university-level learning,” Johnston says.

One parent, with one child who has graduated from St. George’s School and another who is approaching graduation, has only the highest praise for the academics programming at St. George’s. Her eldest came to the school in Grade 8 after she was told by his previous school that he “had no more potential, that he wasn’t really going to be able to achieve much” because of how far behind he was at his age. That same boy graduated from St. George’s having won awards every year and never had an average below 90 percent.

Johnston’s last position was at an all-girl’s school, and there are obvious differences—“height, smell, pitch of a voice, all sorts of things are really obviously different,” he says. But there are some key differences that can take some time to realize, but which need to be factored into educational programming—though Johnston is quick to note that boys and girls don’t fit into neat, binary boxes.

One of those differences is how students become disengaged. “Typically, at an all-girls school, the disengagement is very quiet and passive, and as a teacher, you may not even notice that your students are disengaging,” Johnston says, adding that he had a very different experience in his first year at St. George’s as a Grade 9 science teacher. “When they disengaged, it was flicking water, turning on gas taps—it was very obvious. I knew right away; I got that instant feedback,” Johnston says.

In some ways, that makes tailoring education for boys easier: teachers are forced to quickly adapt their lessons to be more engaging. But it also requires more stimuli, more outlets for boys to fidget and to address their typically higher need for physical activity.

Some of this is baked into the environment, sometimes in minute detail. In the new Senior School, every chair has the ability to spin 360 degrees and allows for what Johnston calls “micro-fidgeting” built into their design. “If you allow for a little bit of movement, you can put up with more sedentary time,” Johnston says.

But it also means more “brain breaks” and more physical education hours each day in the Junior School programming as well as taking a more experiential approach to learning, acknowledging that boys struggle more with teacher-centred, sedentary learning.

The school’s inquiry-based philosophy of education is reflected in its hands-on approach to learning—both seek to engage the student and involve him in the process of learning, rather than learning being a thing that happens to the student.

Roberts talks excitedly about one group of Grade 2 students who have ducklings that have recently hatched.

“The boys have a rotation of cleaning up everything and making sure the ducks are all fed, and it’s the silliest thing that takes so much energy. But the boys love it, and it’s teaching them something real,” Roberts says.

“It’s teaching them about our core values and empathy and responsibility, and the Grade 2 life cycle curriculum that’s in their social studies and science curriculums. What better way to learn that than hatching little ducklings, naming them, caring for them, putting them in water, and watching them swim, and writing them little notes. … It’s pretty sweet, if not efficient. It’s a lot of work, but the very best thing for boys, I think, is to connect learning to the real world.”

The ducklings were so successful the first year that Grade 2 students now do it every year. It brings out a nurturing side in the boys, which fits into St. George’s School’s mission of shaping good men, and it proves that boys are “so much more than whatever preconceived notions we have about them,” Roberts notes. “These boys are artists. These boys are nurturers. These boys are compassionate. These boys are feelers. These boys care deeply.”

“Will they also wrestle? Yes, they will. Do they also get into scraps in the schoolyard? Yes, they do, 100 percent, but they also hold each other’s hands and they also cry in front of each other, and they also love playing the flute.”

On top of connecting their learning to the real world, Junior School students’ learning in one subject is often also interwoven with other subjects—science is connected to social studies and to math. A science lesson about rock formation is connected to a social studies lesson on Chinese immigration in Canada and their work on the railroad that connected British Columbia to Eastern Canada.

Co-curriculars are an essential part of the St. George’s experience. In Grades 8 to 10, students are required to take a co-curricular in each of the three terms in the school year, and they are required to take one in two out of three terms for Grades 11 and 12. But it’s rare for students to struggle to meet those minimums—Lee says it’s more often that staff need to remind students that rest is also important.

“Engagement is not usually an issue here at the school,” Lee says. “What we find is that kids are actually oversubscribed. They do too much. That’s more of a problem here than anything else. We have to actually temper them, bring it back. ‘No, you can’t do three activities in one term.’ And some of these kids are actually high-functional—they’re killing it in the classroom and they’re doing well outside, but they’re doing too much and they don’t have time for themselves, and we have to teach them about moderation and all of these things as well.”

As has already been noted, the school takes a holistic approach to schooling, and co-curriculars make up no small part of that. Class time and life outside the classroom, Lee notes, are “inextricably linked.”

“They’re not siloed. Our academic program is not siloed from our student life program. They have to work together. We have mandatory co-curricular activities in the school, as is academics mandatory, obviously,” Lee says. “But falling short of one leaves an incomplete education for us, right? And all of that, of course, is nestled in our character education program and our values that we bring forward.”

Students, staff, and parents alike speak in glowing terms of the vast array of options students have in co-curriculars, from a wide range of sports available to the different arts they can do, from theatre arts to pottery to music.

The offerings are so wide-ranging, Lee notes, that it would be particularly worrisome for a student not to want to engage in co-curriculars, as there’s something for just about anybody—and plenty of new passions for students to adopt.

When Young first arrived at the school, he says, he thought there were too many co-curriculars. But he’s come to learn that variety is an integral part of the school’s ability to work with any boy.

“Not many adolescent boys know what they love, and there’s so many experiential opportunities here, it’s almost like a boy accidentally snags on something because he’s had the experience and he loves it,” Young says.

Indeed, by all accounts, St. George’s School is a place where boys go to discover what they are passionate about and also find activities and subjects they never would have thought they would love. One current student from Finland went to St. George’s thinking hockey was his sport, only to find that upon arrival, his true passion was rugby. And everyone we spoke with knew someone with a similar story — or had one of their own.

One parent says she never expected her son to get involved in any sports. “Everyone who has ever known him has always known him as a music person,” she says, adding he plays five different instruments. Halfway through the school year, his various musical instruments are now complemented by all varieties of balls—soccer balls, basketballs, and, perhaps soon, a rugby ball. “He’s now 100 percent into sports, which is not a bad thing. He’s now more balanced,” she adds. “We never, ever, ever thought that sports would ever, ever, ever appear in our household.”

Another parent commented on her son’s near-opposite trajectory. She says she would have laughed if anyone told her someone in her family would be an artist—“not that there’s anything wrong with being an artist, but just because we as parents have zero talent,” she says. “I go meet the art teacher, and my son, apparently, is an artist. It’s hard to imagine.”

Students similarly tell us they went to the school as athletes but found a passion for art. “If you were to go to the rugby field, like half those guys are doing stuff you would never even guess. Our prop plays the trombone—you just wouldn’t guess that stuff,” one Grade 12 day student says.

Another student from Finland, who came to St. George’s School in Grade 10, plays hockey, and he thought that would be the biggest focus of his co-curriculars. Now in Grade 12, has found a passion for television production, even achieving an award for that work. Asking himself how he got to that point, after never thinking he would be interested or talented in arts, the student reflects: “I’ve been kind of falling in love with this thing the entire two years I’ve been doing this.”

There’s one particular activity, however, that everybody loves: pottery. One parent notes she went on a few different tours of the school, and when students doing the tour were asked what their favourite class was, they all said ceramics. “They would never take pottery in a co-ed environment,” the parent says. “And they say it’s such a break from their day.”

Similarly, when we toured the school, the student doing the tour was excited to show us the ceramics room. He noted that the students all love pottery there, and it’s a room they’ll utilize outside their class and co-curricular time to unwind.

“Several months ago, I went down there one lunch, and there must be 10 boys around, in a circle, they’ve hacked the speaker system and they’ve got their Spotify playlist going, and in the group, I saw boys who were on the basketball team the night before, guys who were in the play, just a random group over their lunch hour,” Young says.

“It wasn’t their class. They weren’t doing art because it was for a defined project. They were doing art for pleasure and the community and fun. They were just chatting away. And I realized, oh, they’ve snagged on something that will have a place in their life.”

“Some of those boys will try to practice their newfound love for art professionally and through university,” Young says, “while others will retain it simply as a hobby.”

The school’s holistic approach ensures that students graduate as confident, capable, and compassionate young men in addition to accomplished scholars. Overall, St. George’s School offers an exceptional educational experience within its state-of-the-art facilities, shaped by a rigorous curriculum and a strong focus on character development. The school is committed to nurturing the unique talents of each student, helping them become well-rounded individuals who are prepared to contribute meaningfully to the world.

“We want students to be engaged. We want everyone in the school to be engaged in the community and to find that thing that they’re really passionate about, that thing that really excites them. And I think, ultimately, that makes them belong,” Donnici says. “The more that we offer, the more they can do, the more they belong.”

“Building fine young men” at St. George’s School comes with a set of principles around how the students interact with the world around them. Global stewardship blankets the school’s programming, including co-curricular clubs and volunteerism, as well as shaping the school’s curriculum. And the school has a particular emphasis on building relationships with the Musqueam First Nation, whose community is just south of the school campus.

The school has 10 flex days to fulfill its requirements for career-life education. On those days, there are no classes, leaving no conflict for things like experiential learning. For Grades 8 and 9, this includes academic deep dives with experiential learning they wouldn’t be able to fit into their regular classes. Grade 8 students learn about who they are and what it means to be part of the community, before going to visit the Musqueam First Nation, touring the Dunbar community, and doing sustainability work. Grade 9 students similarly talk about their place in the city, and they are connected with community groups to learn about social impact work.

For those in Grade 10, the school is looking to begin integrating work experience into the program. Head of Global Stewardship, Sarah McLean says she has worked to embed the principles of her program into the work experience the students get. In Grade 11, the students spend the mornings of flex days volunteering in the community. And in Grade 12, the students work on their capstone projects—a part of British Columbia’s curriculum that sees students culminate their learnings with a project that integrates career-life experience and personal interests.

Global stewardship is also integrated into the student government, with those elected to student government taking the lead on a variety of portfolios. They have a sustainability portfolio, which includes running a community garden; a justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (JEDI) portfolio, which runs events like Orange Shirt Day and Black History Month; and a community engagement portfolio, which involves students in building partnerships with community groups, running initiatives, and setting up student volunteer opportunities.

“They do it because they want to lead, and they want to develop their impact in the community,” McLean says.

St. George’s is also looking to shape curriculum not only in their own school but for other schools in the area. The school is co-designing an experiential Indigenous education course with the Musqueam Nation. Since it’s still in the works, McLean says there aren’t many details to share, but the school is working with Musqueam to include a focus on learning about that community, its history, its culture, and its values.

“What’s really important is to challenge narratives that we hear in the community. So I think the work that we do together [with Musqueam] in shaping a really robust, thoughtful curriculum program will have so many impacts on students questioning what they hear and using their curiosity and inquisitiveness,” McLean says.

That includes asking questions about the history of Canada and its impacts on Indigenous communities, as well as looking critically at the existing relationship between Canada and First Nations. McLean says it’s key to place Musqueam in a central role in developing that curriculum to ensure its authenticity. And by developing it as a curriculum, instead of having Musqueam come to the school to teach it every year, the school is able to relieve the First Nation of some of the burden of continually teaching non-Indigenous people about these issues.

“Musqueam want to work with us on this because we put the time in on it, but they don’t want to come and just be a guest speaker and go away,” McLean says. Instead of being a neighbour that comes and goes from the school, the Musqueam input on the curriculum places the First Nation in the very structure of the students’ learning experience.

But the curriculum won’t just be for St. George’s. “This isn’t going to be owned by St. George’s. We’re going to share this with any school that wants to use it, because that’s how it has the impact that we hope it will have,” McLean says.

For every available space, St. George’s School sees about four applicants, meaning only a quarter of applicants get in. And applying for a spot is an intensive process.

St. George’s School sets a great deal of importance in getting to know the students they are considering for admission—and their families—as part of the application. “The school has a high retention rate—somewhere in the range of 98 per cent,” Andersen says. “That means the school is often entering into a 13-year relationship with the students and their families when they start with St. George’s in Kindergarten.”

“So not only is the academic preparation really important to determine, but it’s also that character alignment, what areas that the students and the families will be able to contribute, and that we will be able to support them,” Andersen says. “So it’s really getting to know those students much more at an individual level.”

The school’s emphasis on “building fine young men” is an important part of the process, but Andersen notes this isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. “We recognize that there are many different ways to be a young man, just as when you’re building a building, it can be different shapes, different architectural designs,” Andersen says. And the school recognizes that there’s “great value” in having variety in designs.

“But we want to be part of building a really, really strong foundation and helping them shape themselves. But it does start with a strong foundation. The admissions office has a pretty important role in that, so that the faculty trust that they have a classroom full of students with a lot of potential,” Andersen says.

The application process starts a full year before the school year, with intake years typically at Kindergarten and Grades 4, 6, and 8, as well as a small number of openings for some other grades if they have the space. The applications start with an online form, with families sharing general information about themselves, as well as an essay to be written by the parents.

In the meantime, the school wants parents to know the school “as much as possible” and hosts open houses and campus tours throughout the fall—that includes bringing parents of prospective students through the school during the school day, so they get a picture of the kinds of activities available and the general student experience.

It also gives parents a chance to learn about the benefits and attributes of the school and to see where those align with their own values.

The information gathered by the school falls into two specific areas: academic readiness and character alignment. For the former, the school asks for references from teachers and report cards or school transcripts, as well as standardized testing. For the latter, the students attend a group assessment, where the prospective students are interviewed as a group and engage in activities together, with staff looking for examples of leadership and creativity and how the boys interact with one another.

And the school does one-on-one interviews with the prospective students and with their parents.

Throughout the process, the list is narrowed—not all students are invited to interviews, or to write a standardized test. The school collects and analyzes a wide array of data points. “There are spreadsheets involved,” Andersen says. “And there are calculations…We take a lot of time to create standardized rubrics for any process that involves a human element.”

Whether it’s interviews, group assessments, character reviews or character references, the school has developed guides for evaluators to score applicants. And everything is wrapped up into a package for the admissions committee.

One thing that makes Young “excited and terrified in equal measure” is a desire from the St. George’s School community for “any great boy” to attend the school. Terrified, he says, by just how ambitious the plan is. “Independent schools are incredibly expensive, and an outcome of that is it’s not accessible to everybody,” Young says. To address that, the school has a large endowment fund. Young says this endowment gives the school’s community “flexibility to just bring in great students.” The aim is to enable students not only to endure, but also to thrive at the school.

“It’s not unique—it’s ambitious to the extent that we imagine doing it,” Young says.

And the school is also aware that it has a reputation “for better or worse,” Andersen says, “and one, at times, that can be considered a school that is for certain groups of families.” The school is working hard to broaden its awareness not only as a school, but as a school that is accessible to families who can meet its character and academic requirements through financial assistance.

“We are open, and we’re trying to grow our accessibility to families across the city,” Andersen says.

In all, the school currently has $2 million available in financial assistance for students starting in Grade 4, with 90 percent of the student population eligible for assistance. A third-party financial analysis is done to determine how much a given family can afford, and based on that information, a financial assistance committee makes an offer.

The school has a financial aid calculator on its website with which families can determine, based on their household income, how much financial aid has been awarded in past years. “We’re also happy to consult with them and have a conversation with them, but essentially, if a family cannot afford the full fees, there are bursaries available to help compensate that, and families should really know that we do not want the financials of the school to be barriers for them to attend,” Andersen says.

Once a student has been admitted to the school, they’ve entered a wide and deeply connected network of St. George’s School attendees. Just as St. George’s School sees its boys’ education as going beyond the bricks and mortar of the classroom, its community extends far beyond its campus and well past graduation. One thread that has continued throughout the school’s century of existence, Young says, is the sense of responsibility for one another like he’s never seen at any other school he’s worked at.

“I’ve not been at a school where [there is] the responsibility to pick up a phone if another St. George’s boy calls you anytime in your life. And there’s story after story of just really beautiful, pastoral moments of care for each other. Sometimes in careers, sometimes in moments of crisis, sometimes in moments of joy, and sometimes sadness,” Young says.

It starts at the school level, with students developing community among themselves. Senior School Principal Len Gurr says that while academics is a “foundational pillar” of all schooling, a key to ensuring academics are a success is in ensuring equity, inclusion, and belonging. And this isn’t achieved through homogeneity—the school believes boys can best find community by finding what niche they fit into. “How is our school a place of belonging and purpose for every single boy who goes here?” Gurr says, noting the school’s emphasis on a wide array of programming to meet every boy’s need is part of that. “The way in which things are valued and very much supported allows for so many different places for boys to experiment, to take risks, to find passions and talents they didn’t know they have, and to really feel a sense of belonging and connection to others in our community, and also, I think, our attention to the well-being of our students.”

These different niches are widely celebrated among the student population. Rather than one sport taking all the oxygen, Gurr notes a student film festival will pack an auditorium just as a varsity basketball game would. “And the boys see that, right? Last week, we had a massive arts exhibit. It’s the second one of the year. The entire community comes to that,” Gurr says. “And this coming together of the community to celebrate all achievements affirms and bolsters boys who find new passions at the school. Not only do they come to realize they have a passion for ceramics or the tuba, they are also respected by the school community for their progress on that passion. Which is meaningful, because I think there are schools that offer certain things, but there’s an understanding that it’s a bit of a lesser-regarded pursuit.”

This attitude is echoed by the students—one day student recalls meeting a homesick boarding student who missed his community and culture. The boys were part of the same religion, and the day student was able to help make the boarding student feel more at home with that shared experience. But at the same time, St. George’s becomes its own shared experience, which ripples throughout the students’ lives.

And that bond is formed not only with the boys who attended school at the same time as one another. The St. George’s community connects across generations—and demonstrations of this can come serendipitously. One parent attests to an elderly man recognizing her son’s uniform in the street and striking up a conversation with them. “It’s amazing having that bond for the school together, and it doesn’t really stop,” that parent says, noting that men who graduated from the school in one generation could reach out to a graduate from an entirely different era in a country they happen to be visiting and grab a coffee with them. “This [is] camaraderie that never, ever ends.”

And one parent describes that camaraderie as “contagious”—it isn’t just the students and alumni who feel it. The community extends to the parents, who describe helping to put on events for the school community, including the school’s fair, and being a parent liaison for a particular grade, among other things.

“It’s a phenomenal community. I get to know every single staff member, down to the maintenance staff, who are amazing people,” says one parent. “You’re just surrounded by this incredible group of people who do not have to volunteer. It’s not part of what you need to do, but you want to because you just love the community.”

That seems to be by design. Parents describe a school whose staff make great effort to get to know the families—one parent recalls being shocked by going to a school event in a mask during the pandemic, and the school staff were still able to know who she was by name. “They know the importance of getting to know you and your family and your son, and I think that’s another testament to the school,” another parent notes.

St. George’s School offers an enviable experience that is invaluable to its graduates. The boys who go through the school are given every opportunity to succeed, but that success isn’t handed to them—it comes through rigorous programming that puts the students to the test. St. George’s School is meticulous in crafting a student experience that doesn’t pamper or patronize the boys, nor does it remove their agency. Indeed, the boys, through a fine balance of guided leadership, are part of crafting their own experience, through leadership programs like the student government and prefect programs.

With that balance, the school is able to build young men who will take on leadership roles in the careers ahead of them. They will go into university prepared for academic rigor, and they will be able to take the space in first year to find their footing, with much of their school being a review of concepts they’ve already learned in St. George’s.

Students who come to the school from afar will naturally experience some home sickness, as in any boarding school, but they will find a new home in St. George’s. It’s hard to imagine not forming a community at the school, with the deep level of programming available to the students. The design of the school—through academic programming and co-curriculars, as well as the boarding program’s activities—is such that students are given innumerable opportunities to interact with students and faculty they aren’t used to interacting with.

While students come out of the school with a leg up, they don’t necessarily enter the school that way. St. George’s works to ensure it isn’t just students with privileged backgrounds who can attend the school, with a large endowment to fund students whose families wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford attending St. George’s—or any independent school, for that matter. And they work to instill that philosophy of equity into the students themselves, through a robust global stewardship program. The students are taught to use their leadership skills in such a way that would not only advance their own careers, but also uplift their communities and the world around them.

The school’s approach to learning is holistic to ensure a well-rounded experience. It ties learning across subjects to impress upon students that any given issue doesn’t have a singular function or cause but is connected to a broader system. By a similar token, the school offers a vast array of co-curriculars, understanding that by leaving out students whose passions don’t fit into a limited set of co-curriculars, you’re necessarily excluding certain angles for approaching excellence. It recognizes that you can meet a student where he’s at, while still challenging him to meet the highest standards. The school knows that there is no one mode of masculinity. And it utilizes its all-boys setting to give its students the space to explore what works for them.

If the school’s academic and co-curricular programming isn’t enough, its community should seal the deal. Students leave St. George’s School not only with a prime educational experience, but with a network of alumni that spans the world, and who are keenly interested in meeting and supporting their fellow graduates. And students get all of that while spending their formative years in a peaceful corner of one of the most beautiful urban settings in North America.