I fear the path of "boutique" schools. I worked at one in Calgary for about 9 years. We were a specialty program school and attract students from around the city. The difficulty at a boutique school is that other programs pay the price for this uniqueness. We had a huge performance visual arts aspect at our school and when I started we were very strong in athletics as well. However, with all of our additional funding going into the arts, and absolutely zero school funding going into sports (all sports funding was self generated through team fees and fundraising) our school has now fallen off the map athletically. We can barely field teams in most of the major school sports. On top of this academics suffer incredibly as well. Now, perhaps this is better for the Arts students but we still have a demographic of, for lack of a better word, regular students. They are severely underserved in the name of our boutique school. They get jammed in huge academic classes so we can maintain small arts classes. If we allow the schools to remain competitive in this boutique style then we are severely segregating students and removing the potential for them to experiment with other activities. High school should be diverse or else we end up with junior high students with similar stress as our grade 12s have when choosing their university. Now picking your high school will carry similar implications.
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