Leadership interview with Karen Jurjevich, Branksome Hall

I really believe in the empowerment of women. I also strongly believe that girls, at different ages and stages of their life, learn differently. And the idea to come to a school, where your competency is not questioned, your curiosity is not questioned, your desire to make a difference is not questioned—it’s actually what’s welcomed—in an all-girls school, that can really take off and flourish.

Branksome Hall is the only all-girls, three-program, IB school—day and boarding school—in our country, and in the city of Toronto, where all girls, from kindergarten to Grade 12, are part of the International Baccalaureate program. And I start with this as an example, because not only do we embrace an academic program that is world-renowned but also the IB program has really put an emphasis on service and the fact that we have a responsibility to be good global citizens in this world and give back.

The IB has also led the way for Branksome Hall in terms of impacting our culture in a way  for us to embrace the importance of thinking beyond Elm Avenue, where our school is located. Thinking about our city, our country, our world has really been the opener for so many additional changes to our school, and is certainly tied directly to the opening of Branksome Hall Asia, on Jeju Island in South Korea. When you’re in Grade 9, all of our students have this opportunity to travel to Branksome Hall Asia—as do our students at Branksome Hall Asia—to study and be immersed in another country and in another culture.

We have this opportunity, I think, in an all-girls school to bring out the real strengths and the real potential of each individual girl. If you ground that in the values of making a difference, creativity, sense of community, and inclusiveness, there isn’t one student on this campus that cannot see herself reflected in one of those values, which are very foundational to the school.

Branksome Hall also has some unique features that really inform who we are and make Branksome such a leading-edge school, and one of those examples would be the Chandaria Research Centre. We opened the Chandaria Research Centre in 2016 as a research center that would serve not only Branksome Hall, but also girls schools worldwide researching questions around social, emotional wellness and health in all-girls education. This has been a unique feature that has not only informed best practices at Branksome Hall—taken our knowledge to another level—but also schools around the world.

I like to talk about innovation as a mindset that you can apply to any subject, to any problem, to any challenge that you are facing. And through this approach, we have developed a program called Noodle, which is a business accelerator that provides girls with the opportunity to to compete with a project in an environment where they are presenting a design-thinking problem, creating a solution, and in the end being judged on their solution—seeing how far they can take that. Noodle has been a great example of an innovator’s mindset at work.

Our athletics and wellness centre at Branksome Hall is truly state-of-the-art with saltwater swimming pools, yoga studio, dance studio, a dining hall that everybody tells me is the best food in the country. These things are able to enhance your program and the experience of our students. Anyone who really puts their health and wellness and social-emotional learning at the top of their list of important attributes of a school will be attracted to Branksome Hall.

We are located in midtown, close to the busyness of the city of Toronto—and yet we have 13 acres of property, that’s well treed, that’s built into the ravine, that’s been here in this location since the school opened in this location in 1912. It’s absolutely a brilliant location to be able to leave the campus and embrace what the city offers.

It is so important to understand that we share the city with so many people, and at Branksome, it’s wonderful because they’re right at your doorstep. For example, the ability to connect with our partner school, Rose Avenue Public School—we can walk there; it’s just a great thing about being in St. James Town. Or, the ability to partner with the Rotman School’s Desautels Centre for Integrative Thinking, for our approach to the development of strategy—again, just around the corner. We’ve really reached out to the city and made partnerships that have enhanced our offering here at the school.

This is a school that’s never sitting still. This is a school that has embraced innovation, embraced the future, and is always looking to really address what the best product is for our students. Never sitting still.

The IB program is world-class. It’s a rigorous program. And it’s a program where we attract students who really want to learn, who are truly curious, who see that by engaging in an international curriculum, my point of view will be broadened, and my understanding of this global world, that we’re such a part of, will be enhanced.

Branksome Hall offers over a million dollars in financial aid, and this money is really from the generosity of donors—mostly current families and alumni, who really believe that a Branksome education is an important opportunity for students who perhaps could not afford that. So we’re quite proud of our financial aid program, primarily because we really value diversity, inclusion and equity, and through financial aid, we’re able to get at that really important priority of our school.

If Branksome Hall were a person, it would have a true sense of care and consideration for others; a sense of joy and spontaneity, which our students bring every day; and a genuine curiosity and innovator’s mindset.

We have taken a hard look at our facilities, because facilities have to match the excellence of the program. At Branksome Hall, our focus is on the arts and innovation as our next targeted area for improvement in our facilities. We have made excellent progress and we’re about a third of the way through the pre-construction planning for ICAST, which is the Innovation Centre and Studio Theatre. So it’s innovation and performing arts combined, meant to enhance facilities in the same way we did with the Athletics and Wellness Centre.

Programmatically, we have looked hard at our DEI—our diversity, equity and inclusion curriculum—and our policies from the HR perspective, and from the admissions perspective. And I suspect in five to 10 years that Branksome Hall will look just more diverse and there will be even greater diversity and a greater sense of inclusivity. So that’s really exciting for me to see that work taking off, and the progress we’ve already made.