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It takes a community to educate a child.
For Mari Matsuda of Burnaby, British Columbia, that community begins with herself, her husband Jeff, and their teenaged children, but extends to include the teachers, administrators and parents of other children at Stratford Hall in Vancouver.
A school community with involved parents
Megan, 15, and Ryan, 13, entered Stratford when they were in Grade 2 and Kindergarten, respectively. The first family to sign up when Stratford began, Matsuda has been strongly involved with the day school, watching it grow and getting to know the teachers, school officials and other parents well. “It’s more of a community. I think of it as a small town, because you know what’s going on, the parents are always in tune with everything,” Matsuda says. “The parents want to be involved, they want to have that rapport with teachers, and at our school definitely you can go straight to your teacher.”
Close involvement with you child’s education
That unique depth of community feeling between parents and school officials at the day school would be harder to achieve in a boarding school setting, where many parents live far away, says Lindsay Neilson, director of community development for Stratford Hall. Before she joined Stratford, Neilson worked for 18 years in international education and saw many students who were far from home. At the day school, she says, parents can get more closely involved with their sons’ and daughters’ educations. “They’re here, we see them almost every day,” she says. “It’s probably easier for a day school to get parental input.”
While advocates of boarding school point to students’ increased independence, Neilson says that can also be learned later on, perhaps in university. After all, there’s something to be said about returning each day to a family environment. “I think it’s probably important not to have all of your experiences happening in one setting,” says Rena Upitis, an education professor at Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. “There is certainly evidence that kids who are well-adjusted socially thrive from being in private day schools.”
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