Having reviewed the ‘Faith in Our Future’ proposal, I would like to express my concern regarding the long-term implications of the proposed plan. Particularly, my concerns pertain to ‘closure and relocation of grades 10 to 12 programming at ESSMY’.
I was born and raised in St. Albert, and attended Ecole Marie Poburan and ESSMY for the entirety of my elementary and secondary education. While the global astuteness of my parents should certainly not go ignored, my family honestly stumbled upon French immersion education because the daycare room at Les Tournesols was the only one that my painfully anxious and shy older brother tolerated. So, we stuck with it. As a young child, it never even crossed my mind that my school was any different than the schools that my neighbourhood friends went to. As an adolescent, I became acutely aware of the fact that the building was orange and that us Frenchies were significantly less likely to get invited to any decent parties. But now that I am well into young adulthood, I have come to understand the immense privilege it was to attend one of very few single-track French Immersion schools in western Canada.
Upon graduation from ESSMY in 2013, I was immediately accepted into a bilingual and dual Civil and Common Law LL.B. program at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, in partnership with Sciences Po in Paris, France. I finished law school at the age of 21, and went on to complete my LL.M. degree at McGill University. In an economic climate where jobs are few and far between, I was extremely lucky in that I was hired shortly after finishing my thesis. Today, I work as a bilingual legal editor specialising in Middle Eastern law for an international publishing house. I have spent the past few years living and working between Montreal and Paris, the two largest French-speaking cities in the world.
While certainly not every ESSMY grad has chosen to pursue an international career, the key point is that they had the option to. My graduating class, for example, has spread across the world taking on a variety of pursuits, often incorporating both languages. But more importantly, they continue to perpetuate the values that were instilled in them throughout their time at ESSMY, notably a respect for diversity.
As a child of two public educators, I must express my gratitude towards GSACRD for the undoubtedly tireless and selfless efforts they put in to providing the best education possible for their students. I can only imagine the difficulties associated with trying to please the entirety of a particularly demanding Catholic and predominantly upper middle class parent group, all with an ever diminishing budget. But this does not make the potential loss of ESSMY any less damaging. While the graduating numbers may be small, the greater communal impact of a bilingual education must not be forgotten.
Discrimination of any kind is unacceptable. In St. Albert, a community that already lacks diversity, the French-language minority should not only be protected, but also proudly showcased. The current political climate is such that diversity is promptly labelled as disagreement and disagreement is branded as treasonous. The decision to stand against or follow the tide is the Board’s.
Ellen McClure
St. Albert
