Leadership interview with Michael Burke, Royal Crown School

One thing I like about my work at Royal Crown Academic School is the diversity of the student body. What makes our school a little unique is the diversity of the student body. We have international, we have domestic students, we have students who are elite athletes, students who are strong academics. And it's really a cultural mix, socio-economic mix, one that I've not seen in a private or an independent school.

We have a large international contingent of staff members, as well, who speak other languages, who come from other cultures. And together, with each other, we're better and stronger for the experience of mixing.

At Royal Crown Academic School, there is an exciting desire to bring about this diverse mix in a very intentional way. What I found was this exciting opportunity to have two groups that started in different places, Canadian students and international students, come together and create an environment where they can learn from one another.

Academics is the cornerstone of what Royal Crown does and what we provide for our students. We have a four-semester system and our first semester begins in early August. For the international contingent, some may enrol as early as Grade 9, which is the high school period here in Ontario. Others will arrive for Grade 11 and 12. For those students coming from overseas, it's a period of transition. It's brushing up on their English, adapting to a new country, perhaps if it's their first time in Canada. Getting settled in our residence, that would be the start for them.

A lot of the Canadian students are associated with the basketball program that Royal Crown has, which is an elite program. A lot of their transition would be developing their skill sets, developing their fortitude around adversity and challenge as part of any sport at an elite level.

The journeys of Royal Crown students will be fruitful and rich. The journeys will mix as they attend class together, or at clubs or after school activities or outings where another type of learning takes place. It will be intense at times, because each person comes from a very different experience. And they will share that experience, test that experience in this environment, this platform that we call Royal Crown, where they have an opportunity to grow both in themselves and to help others to grow in their learning.

One of the things that particularly a Canadian audience appreciates is the continuity of experience and learning. Even if the teacher may not teach that particular grade level, having them in the institution is very important. I see it as students go by a teacher that they had the year prior or from a couple of years ago, they warmly greet that teacher because that teacher is part of the community. At the same time, it's always good to have a diversity of thought among the faculty, with new ideas, new perspectives brought in from time to time. So having the balance of those two things I think is the best of both worlds.

We want our students to be strong in academics, because we're a school first and foremost, but we also have elite athletics on our site, and we want our students to be good citizens, good people, who will contribute to the betterment of our society wherever they may go. When you can get all three at a high level in a person, that's great.

We have four regular semesters, and there's one summer semester, but in the four regular semesters the students take two courses each. That has an advantage for our particular type of students. One, international students can concentrate on the two courses rather than four as they improve their language skills and understanding. So that helps them. And it also helps elite athletes who have a tremendous commitment to many hours of practice and games and commitments as a result of being elite athletes.

There's another group that our semester system is very helpful for. That's a type of learner, who’d rather concentrate on learning two courses at a time, because of the way they learn, rather than being somewhat distracted or having challenges around organisation when trying to manage a larger load.

Our classes are very small. Our class size this past year was around 10 students per class. It can be between 10 and 15 on average. But what that allows is a lot of individual attention. I tease students that this is a place where you will not be able to hide. You're a person and you'll be noted because there's not that many kids in the class. And so the teacher has ample time to provide support to you, but also to call upon you.

For a student who doesn't mind the individual attention and the commitments that come from that, this is the school for them. We know who our students are. The students know their teachers well and the teachers know them. We have a low ratio of guidance, about one guidance counsellor for every 50 students. So there's lots of adults. We have a very large coaching staff for our athletic program. Again, lots of people who will know you and therefore will encourage you along the road, but also hold a certain accountability.

Culture is very important to the school. We mix different traditions, different languages, different perspectives together with the Canadian experience. I think that one informs our culture because it equips us to be more open minded, open to new possibilities. We are learning how gestures or how symbolism works very differently. Even sentence structures work differently from one culture to another. And so that learning will help everybody build a very special community.

What you have in our culture is a certain grit, a certain perseverance that exists in the community because they're all on this incredible journey. I call our students pioneers. They're almost adventurers, explorers. Imagine leaving their countries at a high school age to come and study here. Teenagers leaving their families, leaving their communities, leaving their support systems, leaving their friends, and going on this adventure. Similarly, many of our Canadian students who form the bulk, who form our elite athletes, are also on a tremendous adventure, not knowing where the outcome will go, but how demanding the pathway is for them, and they commit to that fully.

You have these high achievers, whether they're elite athletes or they want to get into top notch universities with high grades, so they plough through the material with passion. But at the core of their being is doing things differently. That's the common element of the school, even though their pathway, how they got here, was not the common piece. But it's the spirit of adventure and the risk taking that bonds us together. From there, we do the learning and deepen that experience.

We have a lot of support — communication mechanisms that have developed over the years because of our origin as an international student body. We have staff who speak other languages. We obviously have staff who can communicate in Chinese. We have apparatus to maintain high levels of contact. For our other international students, most of the parent body, we keep in touch via Zoom, via various communications, Snapchat. One method does not suit all families. The other part is that they have access to systems where they can track closely the progress of their children. So we allow them access and they can see in real time how their son or daughter is doing at school.

Our current student population of a couple of hundred students allows us to have a certain intimate contact with our parent body, probably that you might not find in a school where you might have 1,000. It's not always easy because you're working in other languages and other cultures, particularly on the international side. On the Canadian side, of course, parents come to the school more often. They walk through the doors; they have direct access. We want to be there for our parents who can never quite get enough information given that their children are teenagers and are not always divulging all the information in a timely way, I'll put it that way. And so we as a school have to make up for that.

We really haven't had conflicts among the student body of any significance. For the most part, they are very polite and committed because of this blending of international and local environment with the structures that I described earlier, small classroom sizes, emphasis on academics, and a certain discipline because it has to be fairly regimented in order to meet the needs of international students or elite athletes.

It's a very interesting school. It has everything that one needs to have a successful school experience. And people who visit are always impressed by the site. We're located in a building that was built to be a school. The building was built at an earlier time of large classroom spaces, and then you have a small ratio of students to teachers as we do. At times it seems very large. If you walk into the building, our second and third floors are essentially classrooms. The main floor has a lot more diversity in the sense that we have a first-class gymnasium where professional teams come to practice. Also on our main floor we have a swimming pool, a dining area, laboratories, and a university lecture room, which we affectionately call the auditorium. Then on the lower level we have a first-class fitness centre that would rival any top gym in Toronto. We have trainers that are there that help the students achieve their best physical shape.

If your child would benefit from the individual attention and the structured semester system with two courses at a time, with a lot of follow up, and then having this interesting and rich cultural and diverse environment around them, then our school would be an excellent option for them.