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Jane Buckley was outside Elmwood school in Rockcliffe Park on a warm and sunny weekday, her digital point-and-shoot camera in hand. The objects of her photographic interest were everywhere around her: hundreds of bright yellow daffodils. The flowers are both Elmwood’s floral emblem and the inspiration for its school colours, yellow and green.
Buckley taught geography at this private girls’ school, located in Ottawa’s most affluent neighbourhood, more than half a century ago, arriving from England for the 1962-63 school year. Despite her original plan to stay for a two-year term, she left after just one, called by Baffin Island and an opportunity to interpret Canada’s glacial history, a vocation better suited to her training and interests.
Her connection to Elmwood, though, predates her brief glimmer of a teaching career there. Her grandmother, Theodora Philpot, founded the school – originally named Rockcliffe Preparatory School – a century ago, in 1915.
The reasons the two women came to Ottawa in the first place, and why each left without ceremony, as well as Buckley’s return not just to the city but specifically to the Elmwood fold and the recent springtime sunburst of daffodils, nicely bends the school’s 100-year timeline back on itself to form a complete circle. Not always a neat one and certainly not without some scrapes and bruises along the way, but one that Philpot would probably look upon today with more than a little satisfaction.
Theodora Philpot, the founder and first headmistress of Elmwood School, in 1920.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Theodora Philpot was a free-spirited pioneer when it came to education. At a time when discipline and rote learning were the norm, the four words she often used to describe her goals at Elmwood were: strong, companionable, free and joyous.
“She was a revolutionary,” insists Janet Uren, who attended Elmwood in the mid-1960s and wrote an extensive history of the school to celebrate its centennial. “And I think very much that the school is now fulfilling her vision.”
It began with just four students, ages four to seven – John Dixon, Lucy Crowdy and Lorna and Mary Blackburn – in a two-classroom farmhouse that Philpot rented from civil engineer Charles Keefer at well below market value.
At the time, Philpot had intended hers to be a boys’ school: its neighbour, Ashbury College, accepted only boys 11 and older, and so Philpot thought her nascent enterprise would prepare boys 10 and under for the bigger leagues.
But she discovered instead a great need for a school for girls, and while Elmwood for many decades – until the 1990s – accepted both young men and women, its student body has always been comprised mostly of girls. No boys have attended since 2008.
Apart from reading, writing, arithmetic, English, history and geography, it also taught sewing and embroidery, singing, poetry recitation, rhythmic marching and scripture, as well as dancing and skating.
Its success was immediate and rapid, yet would be the source of Philpot’s downfall.
During the first year, the school’s student body more than tripled, from four to 14 students. By September 1919, that number increased by three-fold again, to 44. To help deal with this growth, Philpot moved a barn on the property closer to the house, to serve as an assembly hall. The cost of the move, though, left her and her husband, Hamlet Philpot, who taught English, classics and debating at Ashbury, without the funds needed to accommodate the flourishing school. Theodora needed to knock on some doors, cap in hand.
In front, Jean Dunlop was an Elmwood boarder from Pembroke. Behind her: Jean, one of the two Toller girls at the school, Kay Grant and Sharely Bowman. Circa 1927.
WHY SUCCESS CHANGED EVERYTHING
To help ensure the school’s future, Philpot appealed to the pocketbooks of students’ parents and other well-to-do neighbours, a call that was answered by Lilias Southam – daughter of businessman/inventor Thomas Ahearn and wife of Ottawa Citizen publisher Harry Southam – and Ethel Fauquier, widow of engineer and construction contractor Edward Faurquier. The pair agreed to buy the land on which the school was located, and relieve Philpot of the financial responsibility for its operation. The deal allowed the school to continue its expansion, but also had the unintended result, at least for Philpot, of removing her control.
The strain of the new agreement, including arguments over whether the purchase included fixtures previously bought by Philpot, proved too much for the headmistress. She took medical leave halfway through the year and, in June, retired and moved to England.
Replacing Philpot at the helm was her assistant, Edith Buck, whose educational lexicon, in practice at least, rarely included such words as companionable and joyous.
She had come to Canada from England with the intention of simply visiting for a few months, but the First World War prevented her return and so, in need of work, became the fourth teacher hired by Philpot. Three years later, in 1920, she took over as headmistress. It was a position she held for 31 years, an era that saw her formidable influence inexorably transform Elmwood into something Philpot would likely not have recognized as her own – changes that still resonate in its halls and classrooms.
Edith Buck was Elmwood School’s headmistress from 1920-51.
THE BUCK STOPPED HERE
“Mrs. Buck was a fiend,” says Norma Davies, one of Elmwood’s oldest living “lifers,” the term given to students who attend the school from Grade 1 – or kindergarten when it was introduced – to Grade 12 or 13.
The youngest of eight children, Davies attended Elmwood from 1931 to 1942, and still recalls the humiliation that one of her older sisters, as well as other students, suffered under Buck’s fierce rule. “She would read out students’ marks at assembly. When she announced my sister’s 49 per cent, I thought, ‘This is embarrassing. You don’t need to rub it in.’
“My oldest sister, Janet, said that (Mrs. Buck) was never happy unless she could reduce a girl to tears.”
Davies spent grades 12 and 13 boarding at the school, a practice she recalls with little fondness. “I used to climb over the fence and sneak home, for some food or what have you.”
The school’s first boarder, and for a while its only one, was Hume Cronyn, who went on to a lengthy career as a film and stage actor (Hitchcock’s Lifeboat; Cocoon; The Postman Always Rings Twice), and husband of Jessica Tandy. In 1918, the year after his father was elected to the House of Commons, Cronyn moved into the school. In his memoirs, he recalled the melancholy evenings of a seven-year-old: “From eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, Elmwood was abustle with boys and girls from 7 to 12 in age. When they went home there was silence.”
“The school gymnasium-cum-assembly hall at Elmwood was deserted and lonely after school hours but became my private kingdom in the evenings. It was there that I could play wild, imaginative games: there that I became Mowgli or Tarzan, or both the cowboys and the Indians and frequently the horses as well. I led what the psychologists refer to as a ‘rich fantasy life’ and made a great deal of noise, galloping around the near-naked room and rearranging the chairs that stood along the walls (all to be carefully replaced later) into forts, stockades or impenetrable jungles.”
Cronyn’s residential stay was somewhat anomalous, permitted almost as a favour to his father. But it was very much in keeping with the formal, structured English system of education that Buck favoured. She kept a portrait of the King hanging in her office, at which, one student noted, she would “gaze adoringly.”
In 1923, the school’s name was changed to Elmwood, and its first two “real” boarders, girls from Pembroke, moved in. Two years later, the current school was built, and with it dormitories to house 20 students, a practice that continued for four decades.
Buck also started the school’s popular House system, by which students belong to one of four Houses. The three inaugural Houses, formed in 1926, were named for female role models Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller and Elizabeth Fry. In 1982, a fourth was added, named for Cairine Wilson, Canada’s first female senator. Wilson, who was also the mother of Norma Davies and her seven siblings, was a longtime Elmwood supporter and board member.
With its perfect hindsight, history hasn’t been kind to all of Buck’s initiatives. Uren recalls one of the vestiges of her tenure that still prevailed a dozen years after her retirement in 1951: The names of all the students were written on House boards in the main hall, and alongside each name was a row of stars – red ones for when the student did something good, and black stars that publicly shamed bad behaviour.
“Even in the ‘60s when I attended, it was very much the school that Mrs. Buck created,” says Uren. “It was an old-fashioned school.” Under Buck, she added, Elmwood had become “conventional.”
“It was training children – girls – to be hostesses, wives and elite Ottawa people.”
Another well-known alumna, author Elizabeth Smart, felt similarly, later noting that students at Elmwood were educated for a life of service. “Ambition,” she said, “was cast down.”
Not all students viewed Buck with disdain or trembling awe.
“We had marvellous teachers, but the best of all was Mrs. Buck,” recalled Elizabeth Edwards, who attended Elmwood from 1936-43. “She was an enthusiastic and dedicated history teacher. She took us travelling all through the 19th century and into the 20th, although I don’t think we ever got to the First World War.
“She was a good woman,” Edwards added, “but not a warm one, and very few people got to know her. Outside of the classroom, she was very reserved, almost distant, and very strict. Mother liked her, however, and they corresponded until Mrs. Buck’s death. She said it was Mrs. Buck who had really created Elmwood in the 31 years she was headmistress.”
Buck could show tenderness. When the school’s roll grew with the addition of British evacuees early in the Second World War, she wrote this in Samara, Elmwood’s student paper: “But now I would like to say a special word to the English ones amongst you, not because of your being in any sense ‘apart,’ for you have all earned the right to be called Elmwoodians, but because I know that the year has not been too easy for you. Many of you have been homesick and more anxious than your companions have perhaps realized at the time. We have liked the way you have tackled this and have noticed how valiantly you have overcome your prejudices and your reluctance sometimes to accept too readily new way. … We know that there are many things that you miss besides your families and your homes — the way they do things in your English schools, your friends there, English games, even English weather, and in fact everything that is ‘just England’ to you. But we hope you have found much to like in Canada — our sparkling winter days, sunshine on the snow, skiing, the thrill of a Canadian spring and our wonderful outdoor life in summer, and, with all this, the easy comradeship and friendship which we have tried to give generously to you.”
A school photo from the Rockcliffe Preparatory School — later Elmwood — taken in June 1917.
Elmwood School’s graduating class of 2015.
Elmwood School’s central hall, shown here in 1925, looks almost identical today.
The main hall at Elmwood School hasn’t changed much since it was built in 1925. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
MOVING ON UP
There were instances, Uren concedes, when Elmwood was not what Philpot strove for, nor what it eventually became. There were periods in which it was not highly regarded academically, when some well-heeled families sent their troubled youngsters there simply to be rid of them. For the longest time, no formal training or accreditation was required of Elmwood’s teachers, leading to unpredictable results (not that formal training ensures excellence in teaching).
But there were occasions of brilliance and inspiration.
Who knows how things might have turned out for author Elizabeth Smart, for example, had not her Grade 5 teacher urged her to submit a poem to Junior Home, a U.S. magazine for children, which published it and paid Smart a dollar (the equivalent of nearly $14 today). Might she have eventually simply passed through Grand Central Station without sitting down and weeping?
And Norma Davies fondly recalls how, when as a Grade 1 student in 1931 it was discovered that she could do long division, her teacher encouraged her to continue at her own pace.
“I think I got a good education,” she says. Davies, whose daughters, Janet and Caroline Davies, and one granddaughter attended Elmwood, continued her mother’s close relationship with the school after she left. To this day she sits on its board, which she’s done for the past 50+ years.
“I’ve seen it go through bad spells and good spells, depending upon who was head, and I think right now under (head Cheryl Boughton), it’s excellent. She’s very progressive.
“I’m a great proponent of Elmwood now, if I wasn’t when Mrs. Buck was alive.”
An art class at Elmwood School. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
Elmwood today is a comfortable amalgam of old and new, of burnished wood furniture and trophy cases boasting the names of long-passed Old Girls etched in silver, alongside modern science and computer labs, a music room, new library and gymnasium. It is fitting that, literally buried in the walls of its auditorium where students gather weekly to sing the school hymn To Be a Pilgrim, is the old barn that Philpot had moved to the site to accommodate Elmwood’s increasing population.
And if there were times when Elmwood’s academic excellence could be called into question, that’s hardly the case anymore. The school has adopted standards far more rigorous for its 350 students than are required by provincial regulations, including its participation in the International Baccalaureate Programme, which is recognized by universities around the world. Elmwood was the first school in North America to offer the IB program at all three levels: Primary, Middle Years and Diploma, and now boasts that 100 per cent of its graduates continue on to university, overwhelmingly at each graduate’s first choice of schools.
With small classes and a 7-to-1 student/teacher ratio, students on average score 85 per cent on provincial guidelines.
“They don’t all come to us as A-students,” says Boughton, who has been head of the school since 2008. “We help them become A-students.”
Additionally, Elmwood has dispelled old stereotypes by focusing much of its resources, increasingly since the 1980s, on maths and sciences, building labs and outfitting classrooms with SMART Boards and laptops. Each year, anywhere between one-third and a half of its grads pursue further studies in science, technology, engineering or math.
“Even beyond that, a phenomenal number of them become doctors,” says Boughton. “There clearly are career paths they develop for themselves while they’re here.”
Head girl Brooke Mierins is one such student. She wants to become a plastic surgeon, and was accepted at 15 of the 16 universities she applied to, including McGill, University of Toronto, Queen’s, Waterloo, University of Ottawa and Carleton, as well as Florida State, Miami and Fordham in the United States.
“I like this school,” she says. “I try hard. Sometimes the workload is tough, especially with IB.
“But what I think I’ll remember from Elmwood are the people. My teachers are amazing, and have had a huge impact on me and my life.”
Boughton notes that Elmwood just completed a survey of students, asking them to rank a half-dozen generally positive words in the order they feel most accurately describe their experience at Elmwood.
“The two first-place words were challenged and supported,” she says. “And I think that really does sum up our school in a nutshell. These girls really value learning, and they strive for success.”
Jane Buckley taught at Elmwood School for one year in the early 1960s. Her grandmother, Theodora Philpot, founded the school in 1915. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
PHILPOT REVISITED
When she was a youngster growing up in Oxford, Jane Buckley remembers visits to have tea at her grandmother’s home – a dark flat in a large Victorian house – as unpleasant, dour affairs, where children were to be seen but not heard. She had no notion that her grandmother ever ran a girls school, let alone one that championed companionability and joyousness.
It was Buckley’s father, John (an early Elwood attendee who used to love telling people that he was among the school’s oldest Old Girls), who suggested that Jane apply for a position there after finishing university.
The school she arrived at in 1962, however, was very much the one Mrs. Buck had created, and Buckley left after just one year and didn’t look back.
In recent years, however, spurred in part by Uren, whom she met when Uren was researching the school’s history, Buckley picked up the pieces of her genealogical connection to the Elmwood, and learned about her grandmother, who a century ago chose daffodils as one of its motifs.
Last fall, to celebrate the school’s centennial, Buckley and her brother, Andy, donated 1,000 daffodil bulbs that were planted on its grounds. They bloomed recently, and so Buckley grabbed her camera to take some pictures to send to her brother.
“I’m absolutely blown away by the academic standards at the school now,” she says. “Because in the early ‘60s, it was not regarded that highly. And the whole values thing seems to have come around in a full circle in the hundred years, which is delightful.”
Elmwood School’s centennial is being celebrated this year. The Rockliffe private school started 100 years ago with four students (three girls and one boy) and now has 350 girls enrolled from preschool to grade 12. (JULIE OLIVER/POSTMEDIA)
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Buckley taught geography at this private girls’ school, located in Ottawa’s most affluent neighbourhood, more than half a century ago, arriving from England for the 1962-63 school year. Despite her original plan to stay for a two-year term, she left after just one, called by Baffin Island and an opportunity to interpret Canada’s glacial history, a vocation better suited to her training and interests.
Her connection to Elmwood, though, predates her brief glimmer of a teaching career there. Her grandmother, Theodora Philpot, founded the school – originally named Rockcliffe Preparatory School – a century ago, in 1915.
The reasons the two women came to Ottawa in the first place, and why each left without ceremony, as well as Buckley’s return not just to the city but specifically to the Elmwood fold and the recent springtime sunburst of daffodils, nicely bends the school’s 100-year timeline back on itself to form a complete circle. Not always a neat one and certainly not without some scrapes and bruises along the way, but one that Philpot would probably look upon today with more than a little satisfaction.
Theodora Philpot, the founder and first headmistress of Elmwood School, in 1920.
HOW IT ALL BEGAN
Theodora Philpot was a free-spirited pioneer when it came to education. At a time when discipline and rote learning were the norm, the four words she often used to describe her goals at Elmwood were: strong, companionable, free and joyous.
“She was a revolutionary,” insists Janet Uren, who attended Elmwood in the mid-1960s and wrote an extensive history of the school to celebrate its centennial. “And I think very much that the school is now fulfilling her vision.”
It began with just four students, ages four to seven – John Dixon, Lucy Crowdy and Lorna and Mary Blackburn – in a two-classroom farmhouse that Philpot rented from civil engineer Charles Keefer at well below market value.
At the time, Philpot had intended hers to be a boys’ school: its neighbour, Ashbury College, accepted only boys 11 and older, and so Philpot thought her nascent enterprise would prepare boys 10 and under for the bigger leagues.
But she discovered instead a great need for a school for girls, and while Elmwood for many decades – until the 1990s – accepted both young men and women, its student body has always been comprised mostly of girls. No boys have attended since 2008.
Apart from reading, writing, arithmetic, English, history and geography, it also taught sewing and embroidery, singing, poetry recitation, rhythmic marching and scripture, as well as dancing and skating.
Its success was immediate and rapid, yet would be the source of Philpot’s downfall.
During the first year, the school’s student body more than tripled, from four to 14 students. By September 1919, that number increased by three-fold again, to 44. To help deal with this growth, Philpot moved a barn on the property closer to the house, to serve as an assembly hall. The cost of the move, though, left her and her husband, Hamlet Philpot, who taught English, classics and debating at Ashbury, without the funds needed to accommodate the flourishing school. Theodora needed to knock on some doors, cap in hand.
In front, Jean Dunlop was an Elmwood boarder from Pembroke. Behind her: Jean, one of the two Toller girls at the school, Kay Grant and Sharely Bowman. Circa 1927.
WHY SUCCESS CHANGED EVERYTHING
To help ensure the school’s future, Philpot appealed to the pocketbooks of students’ parents and other well-to-do neighbours, a call that was answered by Lilias Southam – daughter of businessman/inventor Thomas Ahearn and wife of Ottawa Citizen publisher Harry Southam – and Ethel Fauquier, widow of engineer and construction contractor Edward Faurquier. The pair agreed to buy the land on which the school was located, and relieve Philpot of the financial responsibility for its operation. The deal allowed the school to continue its expansion, but also had the unintended result, at least for Philpot, of removing her control.
The strain of the new agreement, including arguments over whether the purchase included fixtures previously bought by Philpot, proved too much for the headmistress. She took medical leave halfway through the year and, in June, retired and moved to England.
Replacing Philpot at the helm was her assistant, Edith Buck, whose educational lexicon, in practice at least, rarely included such words as companionable and joyous.
She had come to Canada from England with the intention of simply visiting for a few months, but the First World War prevented her return and so, in need of work, became the fourth teacher hired by Philpot. Three years later, in 1920, she took over as headmistress. It was a position she held for 31 years, an era that saw her formidable influence inexorably transform Elmwood into something Philpot would likely not have recognized as her own – changes that still resonate in its halls and classrooms.
Edith Buck was Elmwood School’s headmistress from 1920-51.
THE BUCK STOPPED HERE
“Mrs. Buck was a fiend,” says Norma Davies, one of Elmwood’s oldest living “lifers,” the term given to students who attend the school from Grade 1 – or kindergarten when it was introduced – to Grade 12 or 13.
The youngest of eight children, Davies attended Elmwood from 1931 to 1942, and still recalls the humiliation that one of her older sisters, as well as other students, suffered under Buck’s fierce rule. “She would read out students’ marks at assembly. When she announced my sister’s 49 per cent, I thought, ‘This is embarrassing. You don’t need to rub it in.’
“My oldest sister, Janet, said that (Mrs. Buck) was never happy unless she could reduce a girl to tears.”
Davies spent grades 12 and 13 boarding at the school, a practice she recalls with little fondness. “I used to climb over the fence and sneak home, for some food or what have you.”
The school’s first boarder, and for a while its only one, was Hume Cronyn, who went on to a lengthy career as a film and stage actor (Hitchcock’s Lifeboat; Cocoon; The Postman Always Rings Twice), and husband of Jessica Tandy. In 1918, the year after his father was elected to the House of Commons, Cronyn moved into the school. In his memoirs, he recalled the melancholy evenings of a seven-year-old: “From eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, Elmwood was abustle with boys and girls from 7 to 12 in age. When they went home there was silence.”
“The school gymnasium-cum-assembly hall at Elmwood was deserted and lonely after school hours but became my private kingdom in the evenings. It was there that I could play wild, imaginative games: there that I became Mowgli or Tarzan, or both the cowboys and the Indians and frequently the horses as well. I led what the psychologists refer to as a ‘rich fantasy life’ and made a great deal of noise, galloping around the near-naked room and rearranging the chairs that stood along the walls (all to be carefully replaced later) into forts, stockades or impenetrable jungles.”
Cronyn’s residential stay was somewhat anomalous, permitted almost as a favour to his father. But it was very much in keeping with the formal, structured English system of education that Buck favoured. She kept a portrait of the King hanging in her office, at which, one student noted, she would “gaze adoringly.”
In 1923, the school’s name was changed to Elmwood, and its first two “real” boarders, girls from Pembroke, moved in. Two years later, the current school was built, and with it dormitories to house 20 students, a practice that continued for four decades.
Buck also started the school’s popular House system, by which students belong to one of four Houses. The three inaugural Houses, formed in 1926, were named for female role models Florence Nightingale, Helen Keller and Elizabeth Fry. In 1982, a fourth was added, named for Cairine Wilson, Canada’s first female senator. Wilson, who was also the mother of Norma Davies and her seven siblings, was a longtime Elmwood supporter and board member.
With its perfect hindsight, history hasn’t been kind to all of Buck’s initiatives. Uren recalls one of the vestiges of her tenure that still prevailed a dozen years after her retirement in 1951: The names of all the students were written on House boards in the main hall, and alongside each name was a row of stars – red ones for when the student did something good, and black stars that publicly shamed bad behaviour.
“Even in the ‘60s when I attended, it was very much the school that Mrs. Buck created,” says Uren. “It was an old-fashioned school.” Under Buck, she added, Elmwood had become “conventional.”
“It was training children – girls – to be hostesses, wives and elite Ottawa people.”
Another well-known alumna, author Elizabeth Smart, felt similarly, later noting that students at Elmwood were educated for a life of service. “Ambition,” she said, “was cast down.”
Not all students viewed Buck with disdain or trembling awe.
“We had marvellous teachers, but the best of all was Mrs. Buck,” recalled Elizabeth Edwards, who attended Elmwood from 1936-43. “She was an enthusiastic and dedicated history teacher. She took us travelling all through the 19th century and into the 20th, although I don’t think we ever got to the First World War.
“She was a good woman,” Edwards added, “but not a warm one, and very few people got to know her. Outside of the classroom, she was very reserved, almost distant, and very strict. Mother liked her, however, and they corresponded until Mrs. Buck’s death. She said it was Mrs. Buck who had really created Elmwood in the 31 years she was headmistress.”
Buck could show tenderness. When the school’s roll grew with the addition of British evacuees early in the Second World War, she wrote this in Samara, Elmwood’s student paper: “But now I would like to say a special word to the English ones amongst you, not because of your being in any sense ‘apart,’ for you have all earned the right to be called Elmwoodians, but because I know that the year has not been too easy for you. Many of you have been homesick and more anxious than your companions have perhaps realized at the time. We have liked the way you have tackled this and have noticed how valiantly you have overcome your prejudices and your reluctance sometimes to accept too readily new way. … We know that there are many things that you miss besides your families and your homes — the way they do things in your English schools, your friends there, English games, even English weather, and in fact everything that is ‘just England’ to you. But we hope you have found much to like in Canada — our sparkling winter days, sunshine on the snow, skiing, the thrill of a Canadian spring and our wonderful outdoor life in summer, and, with all this, the easy comradeship and friendship which we have tried to give generously to you.”
A school photo from the Rockcliffe Preparatory School — later Elmwood — taken in June 1917.
Elmwood School’s graduating class of 2015.
Elmwood School’s central hall, shown here in 1925, looks almost identical today.
The main hall at Elmwood School hasn’t changed much since it was built in 1925. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
MOVING ON UP
There were instances, Uren concedes, when Elmwood was not what Philpot strove for, nor what it eventually became. There were periods in which it was not highly regarded academically, when some well-heeled families sent their troubled youngsters there simply to be rid of them. For the longest time, no formal training or accreditation was required of Elmwood’s teachers, leading to unpredictable results (not that formal training ensures excellence in teaching).
But there were occasions of brilliance and inspiration.
Who knows how things might have turned out for author Elizabeth Smart, for example, had not her Grade 5 teacher urged her to submit a poem to Junior Home, a U.S. magazine for children, which published it and paid Smart a dollar (the equivalent of nearly $14 today). Might she have eventually simply passed through Grand Central Station without sitting down and weeping?
And Norma Davies fondly recalls how, when as a Grade 1 student in 1931 it was discovered that she could do long division, her teacher encouraged her to continue at her own pace.
“I think I got a good education,” she says. Davies, whose daughters, Janet and Caroline Davies, and one granddaughter attended Elmwood, continued her mother’s close relationship with the school after she left. To this day she sits on its board, which she’s done for the past 50+ years.
“I’ve seen it go through bad spells and good spells, depending upon who was head, and I think right now under (head Cheryl Boughton), it’s excellent. She’s very progressive.
“I’m a great proponent of Elmwood now, if I wasn’t when Mrs. Buck was alive.”
An art class at Elmwood School. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
Elmwood today is a comfortable amalgam of old and new, of burnished wood furniture and trophy cases boasting the names of long-passed Old Girls etched in silver, alongside modern science and computer labs, a music room, new library and gymnasium. It is fitting that, literally buried in the walls of its auditorium where students gather weekly to sing the school hymn To Be a Pilgrim, is the old barn that Philpot had moved to the site to accommodate Elmwood’s increasing population.
And if there were times when Elmwood’s academic excellence could be called into question, that’s hardly the case anymore. The school has adopted standards far more rigorous for its 350 students than are required by provincial regulations, including its participation in the International Baccalaureate Programme, which is recognized by universities around the world. Elmwood was the first school in North America to offer the IB program at all three levels: Primary, Middle Years and Diploma, and now boasts that 100 per cent of its graduates continue on to university, overwhelmingly at each graduate’s first choice of schools.
With small classes and a 7-to-1 student/teacher ratio, students on average score 85 per cent on provincial guidelines.
“They don’t all come to us as A-students,” says Boughton, who has been head of the school since 2008. “We help them become A-students.”
Additionally, Elmwood has dispelled old stereotypes by focusing much of its resources, increasingly since the 1980s, on maths and sciences, building labs and outfitting classrooms with SMART Boards and laptops. Each year, anywhere between one-third and a half of its grads pursue further studies in science, technology, engineering or math.
“Even beyond that, a phenomenal number of them become doctors,” says Boughton. “There clearly are career paths they develop for themselves while they’re here.”
Head girl Brooke Mierins is one such student. She wants to become a plastic surgeon, and was accepted at 15 of the 16 universities she applied to, including McGill, University of Toronto, Queen’s, Waterloo, University of Ottawa and Carleton, as well as Florida State, Miami and Fordham in the United States.
“I like this school,” she says. “I try hard. Sometimes the workload is tough, especially with IB.
“But what I think I’ll remember from Elmwood are the people. My teachers are amazing, and have had a huge impact on me and my life.”
Boughton notes that Elmwood just completed a survey of students, asking them to rank a half-dozen generally positive words in the order they feel most accurately describe their experience at Elmwood.
“The two first-place words were challenged and supported,” she says. “And I think that really does sum up our school in a nutshell. These girls really value learning, and they strive for success.”
Jane Buckley taught at Elmwood School for one year in the early 1960s. Her grandmother, Theodora Philpot, founded the school in 1915. (Bruce Deachman, Ottawa Citizen)
PHILPOT REVISITED
When she was a youngster growing up in Oxford, Jane Buckley remembers visits to have tea at her grandmother’s home – a dark flat in a large Victorian house – as unpleasant, dour affairs, where children were to be seen but not heard. She had no notion that her grandmother ever ran a girls school, let alone one that championed companionability and joyousness.
It was Buckley’s father, John (an early Elwood attendee who used to love telling people that he was among the school’s oldest Old Girls), who suggested that Jane apply for a position there after finishing university.
The school she arrived at in 1962, however, was very much the one Mrs. Buck had created, and Buckley left after just one year and didn’t look back.
In recent years, however, spurred in part by Uren, whom she met when Uren was researching the school’s history, Buckley picked up the pieces of her genealogical connection to the Elmwood, and learned about her grandmother, who a century ago chose daffodils as one of its motifs.
Last fall, to celebrate the school’s centennial, Buckley and her brother, Andy, donated 1,000 daffodil bulbs that were planted on its grounds. They bloomed recently, and so Buckley grabbed her camera to take some pictures to send to her brother.
“I’m absolutely blown away by the academic standards at the school now,” she says. “Because in the early ‘60s, it was not regarded that highly. And the whole values thing seems to have come around in a full circle in the hundred years, which is delightful.”
Elmwood School’s centennial is being celebrated this year. The Rockliffe private school started 100 years ago with four students (three girls and one boy) and now has 350 girls enrolled from preschool to grade 12. (JULIE OLIVER/POSTMEDIA)
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