Paul Bennett: ‘The Little Engine That Could’ in N.B. education

Article content

The classic children’s story with the memorable exhortation “I think I can, I think I can” comes readily to mind when you think of tackling a challenge against long odds. It was made famous in The Little Engine That Could, an American folktale, popularized in a 1930 book by “Watty Piper,” the pen name of Arnold Munk, owner of the publishing firm Platt & Munk. Since then, it’s been featured in movies and used often to capture perfectly the great exertions and exhilaration felt in getting over a hump in the road.

Starting a school from scratch is a daunting and herculean undertaking, even in virgin territory. When it’s a private school in New Brunswick the arrival usually goes undetected because it’s widely seen as a school serving the kids of the province’s most affluent families. That’s why, until recently, the tale of the creation of Eastgate Academy in Riverview, N.B., remains a largely untold story.

That all changed a month ago when Eastgate Academy finally made the local news. On March 15, the school’s founding families announced the tiny private school serving Greater Moncton is the first in the Maritimes to gain accreditation from the International Baccalaureate Organization as a Primary School Program (PYP).

Getting the IB seal of approval is quite an accomplishment, especially here in the Maritimes, where IB-affiliated schools are few and far between. Four New Brunswick schools do offer the IB Diploma Program in Grades 10 to 12, but no school, until now, offered an IB-approved program in the younger grades. Eastgate Academy opened in a decommissioned Riverview public school in September 2021, with a small group of initial students in Grades 4 through 6. It was actually conceived in October 2018, more than five years ago, by its incredibly passionate and determined founder, Magdalena (Magda) Berger, a Moncton physician, and one of the province’s few specialists in allergies and immunology.

Dr. Berger and a small group of friends and associates were full of passion, but they went about creating the school in a meticulous, almost clinical, fashion, conducting surveys, hiring consultants, developing a brand identity, investigating several potential sites, and exploring various forms of organization. It was not a school started on a wing and a prayer and, I should know, because (full disclosure) I worked with the founding group doing the initial spade work for a couple of years before it opened.

When the pandemic hit and schools were closed or toggling back-and-forth to home learning, Berger and her allies saw an opportunity. Finally, she and fewer than a dozen parents put up their own money to start an Anglophone private school for their own children and others moving to the province’s fastest growing city.

Promoting a school offering the International Baccalaureate, in any form, is quite a challenge in a region where the term “IB” is either identified with a ‘rigorous high school program’ with standardized exams or completely unknown. Every prospective family is kicking the tires and students are recruited one family at a time, mainly by word of mouth. Many are initially surprised to learn Canada ranks second in the world with 379 out of 4,460 IB accredited schools. Most do offer the full Grade 10 to 12 IB Diploma Program, a total of 187 schools, but 170 schools offer the Grade 6 to 9 Middle Years Program, and some 102 are accredited to offer the K to 5 PYP being rolled out at Eastgate Academy.

The IB Primary Years Program is not at all what students or parents would expect. Unlike the better-known high school program, the junior edition, starting in Kindergarten, is far more progressive in philosophy, offering an inquiry-based curriculum based upon best practice in schools around the world. It’s more closely aligned with the British Columbia elementary curriculum, so that’s what Eastgate offers. Its requirements for K to 8 meet or exceed those in New Brunswick.

The small Moncton school has the early years market all to itself. The four other IB-accredited schools, Saint John High School, Rothesay Netherwood School (RNS) and two Dieppe schools, École Mathieu-Martin , and École Carrefour de l’Acadie offer the program at higher grade levels.

Attracting students to Eastgate is still a challenge. It’s hard for New Brunswick parents, mostly educated in public schools, to conceive of paying tuition fees above and beyond their taxes earmarked for education. Tuition fees of $15,900 per child at Eastgate (2023-2024) sound like a lot, but it’s a comparative bargain. Day school fees at RNS are $25,000 per student and that’s the going rate for Primary School Program schools like Toronto’s Sunnybrook School, the country’s first such program dating back to the mid-1990s. If Eastgate has a model, it’s Stratford Hall in East Vancouver, a start-up initiated by two Burnaby parents in the late 1990s working in collaboration with an enterprising Head of School, Jim McConnell. It started small in September 2000, operated out of an Italian Cultural Centre, then moved in 2005 to a much larger site. With the IB program as a magnet, it today boasts 535 students from K to 12.

Building a comparable school in Moncton requires inspired leadership and lots of sweat equity. Since opening in the fall of 2021, the student enrolment has doubled, reaching 33 in 2023-24 scattered through the grades. Students receive extraordinary personal attention from the teaching head and tiny band of closely-knit teachers.

Berger and the founding group always had ambitious building plans. Starting small was the first phase. The steady growth, IB accreditation, and Moncton’s recent population growth changed the initial calculations. They have just announced that Eastgate will be moving to a new site with curb appeal at 210 Millennium Dr. in Moncton.

It’s a big risk, but if Eastgate Academy’s founding is any indication, we may be seeing the story of the “Little Engine That Could” playing out again, albeit hidden in plain sight.

Paul W. Bennett, Ed.D., is Director, Schoolhouse Institute, Adjunct Professor of Education, Saint Mary’s University, and Education Columnist for Brunswick News. From 2019 to 2021, he served as consultant to the founding group at Eastgate Academy.