As it launches, Phoenix Magnet Academy, which is based on experiential learning, is also offering scholarships to Sea to Sky students in Grades 8 and 9 for the first year.
Student courses will follow the BC Curriculum but are based on Vanoutdoors Society's ideals of outdoor learning and hands-on teaching.
The non-profit society's founder, Frank Sun, is a board director of the Phoenix Magnet Academy.
Parents of youth who attended those outdoor camps pushed for the launch of the school in Squamish, according to Geoff Taylor, headmaster of the academy.
"Some of those early [Vanoutdoors] students are now young men and women, and their parents felt that they wanted to back the opening of a school that integrated the B.C. curriculum with experiential outdoor education," Taylor said.
Jesse Godlington, the academy's experiential education co-ordinator, started working with the Vanoutdoors Society in 2018.
From when he started, there were conversations about starting this high school in Squamish, Godlington said. Throughout this summer, he is leading small camps that give potential students an idea of what the academy will be like.
"We are trying to bring in people internationally and teach them about how we believe you go into and out of these wilderness experiences — Leave No Trace," Taylor said. "We are not just bringing people to enjoy it, leave their litter and go. They will be able to do quite a few things: They will have a lifetime of these activities if they want to; they will know how to fix the equipment and buy the equipment if they want to, how to service that; how to recognize if it is unsafe."
Taylor pointed to a whiteboard set up for students at the school's summer camps that taught risk mitigation as an example of a lesson students would take.
"Can they recognize risk? Can they manage it?"
Taylor said the school received its Ministry of Education approvals to open on June 15, which created a tight timeline to bring in international students by fall — during a pandemic.
"There is a challenge inherent in that," he said. "International boarding school, international visas, COVID and — this year — the date for visa approvals was May 15," he said.
There are agents in various countries recruiting students interested in attending the school, but an international cohort in the first semester will be hard to come by, Taylor acknowledged, thus the outreach locally.
"We are basically saying, 'Hey, this is free,'" Taylor said.
"We are going to be small enough to give pretty individualized attention," said Taylor, who was previously principal or vice-principal of various schools, including Lord Byng Secondary and Britannia Secondary School in Vancouver.
He said though the long-term targeted demographic for the school is international kids, for local students, the administration will be considering scholarships for the second year as well.
"If they do want to send their kids here for the first year, it is new, and it is going to be interesting, but the kids are going to have a ton of support," Godlington added.
The academy will grow with the students as they progress until it is a full high school. Ideally, one day, Taylor envisions 250 students attending the school in a separate building up near Quest, he said.
For now, the school will use facilities at Quest, including dorm rooms — in a separate building from university students — classrooms and the campus cafeteria.
Quest feedback
Quest president George Iwama said in an email to The Chief that Quest University had rented space in the campus' academic building to both the Phoenix Magnet Academy and Coast Mountain Academy.
"For a number of reasons, we have some excess capacity in the academic building, he said.
Quest’s academics will be on the first, third, and fourth floors.
The second level will be rented for classes for Coast Mountain Academy and Phoenix Magnet Academy.
Students from the two academies will not be living in, or able to enter, the Quest residences.
The Quest Meal Hall has always been open to the general public, he noted.
"These two schools are independent of Quest and Primacorp Ventures. This is strictly a rental agreement, designed to have limited impact on Quest students and faculty, and was made for the benefit of Quest University," Iwama said.
"We have benefited from having Coast Mountain Academy students experience our campus for several years now and believe that there are benefits to extending this to the Phoenix Magnet Academy for this year. We expect to need those spaces in the future as our own Quest student population increases due to our recruitment efforts."
