Calgary Girls' School

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Board chair	Liz LoVecchio
Superintendent	Ches Cowley
Principal	Judy Gray
School type	Public charter
Operated by	Calgary Girls' School Society
Location	6304 Larkspur Way SW (in the Lakeview neighborhood) Calgary, Alberta, Canada
Grades	4-9
Religious affiliation	None
Founded	2003
Enrollment	456 (Year 2005/2006)

Calgary Girls' School in bulding formerly used by Lakeview School in the Lakeview neighborhood

Calgary Girls' School (CGS) is an all female public charter school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It currently teaches grades 4-9.

It was founded after substantial controversy, both over the issue of single gender schools, and the idea of charter schools in Alberta. It's one of just two single gender schools in Calgary; the other one being Alice Jamieson Girls' Academy, which also teaches grades 4-9, but is run by the public Calgary Board of Education (CBE). Both schools started in the 2003-2004 school year.

Unlike most schools in Alberta, students in CGS are required to wear a uniform.

[edit] Charter

The CGS is administered by the Calgary Girls' School Society, a non-profit organization dedicated exclusively to administering the one school. As one of 13 charter schools in Alberta, CGS is independent of the Calgary Board of Education, and accountable directly to the government of Alberta. As a public charter school, it receives the same provincial funding per student of any public school. With the public funding, comes the obligation to accept any female student, that it as able to accommodate, without charging tuition. Although if they can't accommodate all, they do exclude students for academic reasons or an inability to meet special needs of a specific student. Like any public Alberta school, it is allowed to charge fees, but they are not tied to the right of admission. The charter, granted in 2003, must be renewed every five years for the school to continue.

[edit] Opposition

The CBE and its main union are generally opposed to the idea of charter schools, since they don't have the same obligations of normal public schools. Organizers of the CGS initially (as required by law) applied to get the same school run under the authority of the CBE (as a type of charter). However certain policies of the CGS compelled the CBE to reject them. For instance, one CGS policy is to give parents a more significant role in evaluating teachers. This would have violated the collective agreement the CBE has with its union[1].

The chairman of the board for the Calgary Girls' School Society, Liz LoVecchio, was a former vice-chair of the CBE. She had left years earlier, during a time of significant conflict within the CBE (Calgary Herald, August 20, 1990). Ultimately she and others representing the CGS could not come to terms with the CBE, and they received provincial approval to separately launched their own all-female schools in the same year the board chose to launch their own non-charter all-female school; teaching the same grades, with similar uniform requirements, and citing similar education research about gender differences in learning. Some critics of the situation didn't see the purpose in having two publicly funded schools teaching the same six grades (4-9), while there are no all-female options for the other six grades, and there are no publicly funded all-male schools for any grade.