NEWS SALTUS PUTS NEW FOCUS ON GIRLS UPPER PRIMARY girls this term will be able to make use of renovated bathrooms with new shower stalls in the Quad—the start of a slew of initiatives aimed at enhancing girls’ experiences at Saltus and keeping the co-ed system strong. The newly-formed Committee for Girls, headed by UP deputy Head Tracy Renaud, produced a report this year with recommendations that were approved in principle by the Saltus Board of Trustees. Among the key suggestions in the “Retention of Girls Report” were improvements to the physical plant to better accommodate female students; enhanced sports and extra-curricular activities; financial incentives to help retain girls; a review of the current admissions process; improved public relations and marketing of Saltus as a co-education facility; and increased training of staff to communicate the School’s passion for co-education and better understand how boys and girls learn differently. “I have been wanting to address this issue for a while,” says Renaud, who will become director of Upper Primary in September. “In our 2009 strategic planning sessions, [educational consultant] John Littleford identified the retention of girls as an area we needed to focus on. Headmaster Staunton asked me to form a committee, which we did. It includes staff—both administrative and teachers— PTA members, parents and students. “All of us, myself included, had or currently have daughters in the School,” adds Renaud, whose two sons and daughter attended Saltus; her daughter, Erica Parsons, graduated from SGY2 in 2009. “So we all felt we were informed, concerned and had a vested interest.” Since Saltus moved from a boys-only to a co-educational institution in 1991, the School, despite many successes, has encountered some challenges in retaining the female component of its student 6 body. According to the report, the percentage of girls in Lower Primary currently stands at 41.7, dropping to 30.21 in Upper Primary. In the Secondary department, the Year 7 influx of students from local schools pushes the figure back to 42.14 percent, and SGY reaches 50-50. The overall percentage of girls in the School this year is 38.64. The new committee will attempt to address some of those imbalances and begin laying the foundation for a new culture for girls at Saltus. Already, the committee has held well-attended meetings, conducted by Renaud and Amanda Skinner—also a committee member and coordinator of the new Parent Ambassador Programme—for parents of female students in both Primary and Secondary departments this year. The meetings’ aim was to promote new ideas and receive feedback from students and their families. “In recent years, exit interviews revealed the reasons parents withdrew their girls from Saltus was a preference for single-sex schools, their feeling that Saltus did not offer enough for girls, and also a concern for the declining number of girls,” says Renaud. “We feel that if we are going to enjoy continued growth, we have to think outside the box and be more creative and pro-active. Further, we need to employ strategies to enhance the experience of our girls and encourage more girls to come to Saltus.” The brainstorming has generated lots of ideas to date, such as creating afterschool clubs like dance and cheerleading; making current clubs and sports teams more welcoming to girls; improving girls’ bathrooms throughout the School; and broadening lunchtime activities on the two fields with additions such as hula-hoops, skipping ropes, and sidewalk chalk, all funded by the PTA. “It’s exciting,” says Renaud, “and we hope we can foster positive experiences for all our students—girls and boys. At the end of the day, girls who come to Saltus and thrive here are the ones who want a co-ed experience. Speaking from experience, it’s taught my daughter about real life. She went to a co-ed dorm in university and she’s still very close to all the boys and girls she went to school with here—it was really wonderful for her. And she’s not alone. Whether there are four or 10 girls in a class, our female students are typically happy, well-adjusted, confident members of their class. As teachers, we see that every day. The challenge is to make sure that as a whole School community, we serve those students as well as we do their male counterparts.” S A LT U S M A G A Z I N E CYNTHIA LANCER-BARNES