It’s been nearly six years since Purcell International Education (PIE) was first formed, with the plan of building a cutting-edge international school on the grounds of the Kimberley Golf Club in Kimberley, B.C., which PIE purchased in 2020 for its school-operating company, Purcell Collegiate Incorporated (PCI).
Through many twists and turns that vision remains the same, but for the meantime, Purcell Collegiate is now officially educating and housing students at the St. Eugene Resort, a former residential school located on the aq’am Community just outside of Cranbrook, owned by the four Ktunaxa communities including the akisq;nuk, aq’am,akinkumasnuqiit (Tobacco Plains), Yaqan nukiy (Lower Kootenay) and the Shuswap Indian Band.
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Due in part to the COVID pandemic and the disruptions in supply chains affecting construction projects around the world, and then skyrocketing inflation, PCI decided to pivot to a new start-up model, which was to welcome 60 to 100 international students to be housed at aq’amand taught at Cranbrook’s College of the Rockies (COTR) campus.
PCI Head of School and CEO Duncan MacLeod said that they’d received their interim certificate later than they had anticipated and hoped for, causing a delay in their ability to engage the international student mobility market and rendering them unable to get the traction needed to open with that 60 to 100 student number.
By August, MacLeod said it had become apparent that with Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) processing times for visas and the same for study permits, and with the international student mobility cycle for 2023 having already expired, they were not going to get those numbers by September and so adapted their model.
Purcell Collegiate School (PCS) now has 12 students enrolled — one from China, one from Japan and the rest from Canada — but have continuous enrolment, and based on the overwhelmingly positive response thus far, MacLeod is expecting growth by November, and then again in February. He hopes to be up to that 60-100 student target by September, 2024.
The school opened on Sept. 27, and the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation was three days later. Chief Joe Pierre welcomed the students and their parents to the school in a ceremony MacLeod said was incredibly significant.
“We couldn’t be happier with who we’ve attracted to the school, how they’ve participated in a formative and foundational way in the school and the journey we’ve embarked on together,” he said.
This stellar initial response, despite the number of pivots along up until this point, is a testament to Purcell’s burgeoning partnership with the aq’am community, MacLeod said, saying that it has created a “lily pad” from which to move closer towards the ultimate vision of building the school at Purcell Golf in Marysville.
“I think the history of Purcell is infused with pivoting — literally, figuratively and otherwise,” MacLeod said. “We’ve got a significant focus on our partnership with aq’am and all the opportunities that it presents for us to access for students and to create in terms of exchange and involvement within the community.
“That’s one of five pillars.”
In addition to its Indigenous focus, PCS is also “sustainable, accessible, inclusive, and international,” all of which remain important now and the work they’ve done in planning the school they intend to build at Purcell Golf, which will be built to Rick Hansen Gold status for accessibility and LEED Gold for sustainability.
“Engaging the Indigenous opportunity that we have here at aq’am in the homeland of the Ktunaxa people, it wasn’t so much a pivot as it was an accessing and extending of an existing aspect of what we’re doing,” MacLeod said. “We’re still working toward and focusing on the sports academies.”
In fact, PCS is currently in the process of applying for its first hockey program through BC Hockey with hopes of having it in place for September of next year.
“In the meantime, if there was a pivot that I would articulate it was the opening of our doors to the broader community more generally.”
In the lead up to the grand opening of the school in late September, PCS made the decision to open its doors to local students in a more general and broader manner than they’d previously planned to. This was, MacLeod explained, indicative of a “re-engagement of the general public in what we were doing and how we were doing it and a new understanding of the landscape that we’re now programming for and engaging against.”
“When we started pursuing the school six years ago Selkirk was much smaller in particular and we felt more vulnerable if a percentage of students were to leave and come to Purcell Collegiate,” he explained. “We didn’t want to do anything that would prevent Selkirk’s ability to program courses on an annual basis, things of that nature.”
In September, PCS discovered that there is a significantly more robust population at Selkirk now, and there existed a different need than they’d formerly understood. Students who were leaving this area weren’t just doing so to pursue sports programs, they were seeking other sorts of programming as well.
“There was a role we can play and a need we can fill and so we haven’t gone to the public in a significant or concerted manner yet but we will be shortly with an opportunity for more local day students here, that’s broader and oriented toward a much more significant local cohort participating in Purcell Collegiate.”
On Monday, Oct. 23 PCI held their first Sparx Speaker Event, the first of a series of 15, each with its own focus, the first featuring former aq’am Chief and Order of Canada recipient Sophie Pierre. These are free and open to not only PCS students, but students from SD5, SD6, independent schools, home schoolers and the general public.
PCI will also soon launch their Club Navigator program, making a suite of extra-curricular programming including clubs like aviation, engineering, and Ktunaxa history, language and culture available to public-school students in addition to PCS students.
MacLeod also referenced the revised B.C. Curriculum and its integration of Indigenous ways of Knowing and First Peoples’ Principles of Learning as being well-suited to and supportive of the PCS model, particularly the interdisciplinary opportunities to activate the curriculum across a broad spectrum of learning. Those opportunities will be extended and enhanced once PCS completes its application to become an International Baccalaureate (IB) school offering the Middle Years Programme (MYP).
“In terms the opportunity to participate in truth and reconciliation, the students at Purcell Collegiate School have in every sense of the word exceptional access to that historic and vital process,” he said. “And that’s been probably the most inspiring realization of the new contracted model, where we’ve consolidated the majority of our operations here at St. Eugene itself.”
MacLeod, who was born, raised and educated Kimberley, had this to say about the PCS partnership with ʔaq̓am: “It’s because of them that we’re able to do this,” he said. “And to have been welcomed into this community and accepted into this building to do what we hope will be a sector changing lighthouse education opportunity, it’s a privilege as much as it is anything else.”
To stay up to date with PCS, visit purcellcollegiate.ca
