Gillian Barker says the smaller class sizes at the private TEAM School in Mississauga helped her feel more comfortable speaking up in class after starting there at Grade 4, and that confidence has carried over into her professional life.Jennifer Roberts/The Globe and Mail
As an introverted child, Gillian Barker felt shy about raising her hand in class when she was in primary school. But that changed after she entered Mississauga, Ont.’s TEAM School in Grade 4. “The small class sizes helped me get comfortable speaking up,” Ms. Barker explains. She says classes were capped at about 12 students in middle school and around 18 students in high school.
Participating in the school’s annual speech nights also helped Ms. Barker gain experience in public speaking, later giving her the confidence to participate meaningfully in her university classes and build her career as a business analyst and operations manager.
“I find myself facilitating a lot of group meetings and leading conversations at work,” she says. “Getting comfortable speaking up at a young age has helped make those situations a little less scary and allowed me to be more off-the-cuff.”
Ms. Barker also appreciates the structure private school offered. “It provided a lot of order while I was growing up,” she recalls. “I gained organization skills and study skills while I was there.” She continues to apply the attention to detail that she fostered during her private schooling in her professional life, keeping her work files organized and ensuring her e-mails and work reports are double-checked.
Attending a private school helped set Ms. Barker up for success after she graduated and progressed into her professional life, and she’s certainly not alone in this experience. It’s something that Jenise Boland, a social studies teacher at West Point Grey Academy, has witnessed frequently in her 17 years of teaching at the Vancouver-based co-ed private school.
“Our graduating classes are under 100 students,” Ms. Boland explains. “It creates this closeness and the small family community that we have. Our alumni are very close-knit. They stay in touch, no matter where they go.”
Ms. Boland has even had alumni return to her classroom during the school’s annual career week, speaking to students about their chosen careers and professions. West Point Grey’s career week is organized by the school’s university and career counselling centre with dedicated staff that help steward students toward their desired education and career paths.
Specialized work experience and volunteer programs also help private school students get a step ahead. West Point Grey alumna Renée Reimer had long dreamed of a career in medicine, so it was a no-brainer for her to join the school’s first responders volunteer club. “You carry a pager at school, and you’ll get the opportunity to help with first aid,” Dr. Reimer recalls. “I actually volunteered to do first aid at the [2010 Winter] Olympics, just for spectators. That was something that I never would have been able to access at public school.”
Getting first-hand experience delivering medical care gave Dr. Reimer a leg-up when she began applying for medical schools. The alumni of West Point Grey were also eager to lend a hand. “I knew people in the years above me who had gotten into medical school,” she says. “I was able to talk to them, hear about their experience and get advice. That was really helpful.” Dr. Reimer is now completing her first-year internal medicine residency at a hospital in Victoria.
Dr. Reimer attended a public French immersion school up to Grade 8 and still recalls how the public-school system compared with her private-school experience. “What West Point Grey offered to me was a smaller environment and abundant opportunities,” she says. “It was an environment that pushed me. I think you can do really well in public school, but you have to seek those [activities] out. If you don’t know how to do that, or you don’t know how far you want to push yourself, private school does that for you a little bit.”
While both Dr. Reimer and Ms. Barker have reaped the benefits of private-school education in their careers in business and medicine, the experience also had a lasting impact on their personal lives. Dr. Reimer met the man who is now her fiancé while she was a student at West Point Grey Academy. Ms. Barker says two of her best friends to this day are people who she met at TEAM School. “There were kids that you were in the same classes with from middle school to high school,” she says. “Instead of jumping around bigger schools, you have that continuity.”