Jonathan Goldbloom to receive Speirs Medal

By Richard Wills, publications editor

On Founder’s Day 2010, Jonathan Goldbloom ’72 will become the fourth member of the Goldbloom family to receive the Speirs Medal, the highest honour that can be bestowed on a member of the Selwyn House community.

Having served on the board of directors since 2001, Jonathan has helped steer the school through some of the most important and challenging issues of its recent history.

Born in Montreal in 1955, Jonathan is the son of Speirs Medalists Sheila and Victor Goldbloom ’37, and the brother of Former Board Chair and Speirs Medalist Michael Goldbloom ’69.

Jonathan and his wife, Alice, met when both were working in politics. They became business partners until Alice elected to stay home and raise their children, Alexandra, now in Grade 12 at Lakefield College School in Ontario, and Matthew, now in Grade 10 at Selwyn House. Alice also served as Chair of the Board at The Study.

Over the years, Jonathan has served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of State, Senior Advisor to the President of Canada Post and President of Phone Market, a Provigo subsidiary. Jonathan served as Vice President and General Manager of Optimum Public Relations before launching Jonathan Goldbloom & Associates Strategic Relations in April of 2007.

A communications specialist, Jonathan managed in 2006 Bob Rae’s bid for the leadership of the Federal Liberal Party. He led the successful 2005 campaign to keep the Shriners’ Hospital in Montreal, as well as a campaign to grant psychologists the right to diagnose children with autism, thus eliminating delays in treatment.

For Selwyn House, Jonathan led the committee to find a replacement for retiring Head Will Mitchell, helped organize the conference on Educating Youth for Global Responsibility, and guided the school’s response to the accusations of sexual improprieties on the part of former teachers.

Jonathan recalls his school days at Selwyn House fondly. “I started at Selwyn House in 1960,” he says. “I think we were the first Grade 1 in the Lucas Building.

“The school has changed dramatically. When I was here it was still a very British school, with that sort of discipline. You lined up on the golden line to go down to lunch. You were graded every 2-3 weeks in every course. You had an essay every second weekend. There was a real discipline to it. It was rigorous. It’s still rigorous, but it was much less creative and much less fun then.

“Another positive change is that French wasn’t part of the fabric of the school then, and it is now. In those days French was just taught as a course. It wasn’t integrated into any other feature of the program.

“To think that 60 per cent of the faculty in the Elementary School would be first-language French would have been out of the question in those days.

“Today, a student has the chance to come out of Selwyn House functionally bilingual and having the option of staying in Quebec. That is very different than my graduating class.

“It was a different approach to education then. I think Headmaster Speirs probably knew our names, but I was Goldbloom II, not Jonathan. There was a greater divide between the teacher and the student than there is now. There wasn’t the same warmth that there is today.

“We have seen the successful transition from a very rigid, English private school to one that was more open and more diverse.

“But despite the transition there’s a consistency at Selwyn House. The standards are still high, the demands on students to meet those standards are still in force, and there are high expectations. What has changed is that there is a better support system to help that child meet them.

Scheduled to graduate from Selwyn House in 1972, Jonathan left school unexpectedly in October 1970. “My father was a member of the Bourassa Cabinet at the time of the October Crisis,” he recalls. “On the Sunday after the day Mr. Laporte was discovered, my father came home and said the decision had been taken by the Cabinet that my mother and I had to leave. My brother and sister were already going to school in Boston, and it was unclear when we would be able to come back, so the decision was taken for me to go to Milton Academy just outside Boston.

“When Matthew started to Selwyn House it rekindled my interest in the school. I became involved on a professional basis in terms of developing a strategy for the fundraising campaign for the new facilities and the endowment, and I have always been involved in marketing and communications at the school, taking an interest in the strategy and overall direction of the school in that way as well.”

On behalf of the Quebec Association of Independent Schools (QAIS), Jonathan led the conference on challenges facing downtown schools, as well as the 2010 conference on the teaching of French. But, since 2002, the greatest part of his time has been spent guiding Selwyn House and the QAIS in their response to Bill 104, which limited the number of Quebec children who are eligible to attend English schools.

“On a practical level,” he says, “if schools like Selwyn House don’t get access to a larger demographic body, they are destined to shrink.” This, he says, would affect not only their viability, but also their student diversity.

“When I started at Selwyn House in 1960, you could count the French-speaking Quebecers on one hand. Today we have students from all ethnic backgrounds, which makes the school what it is today.

“It brings together people from different communities and builds bridges between them. That diversity has made Selwyn House stronger. Unless we succeeded in getting Bill 104 changed we weren’t going to be able to maintain that. And that would have been tragic for the community at large and for Selwyn House.

“What I think has evolved or changed in Quebec society since Bill 22 in the 1970s to today is that the English-speaking community that is here is open-minded about the French language and increasingly comfortable in French, and that we want our kids to be bilingual. That level of linguistic peace is there.

“We’re not a ‘bridging school,’” Jonathan insists. “When Bill 104 was passed there were no kids who came here for one year and got a certificate for that child and his siblings and then went on to a public school. We couldn’t find one kid who had done that. So we were saying that it was unfair to categorize us as une école passerelle and that we needed access to these kids for our institutions to continue.”

After the Supreme Court struck down Bill 104 last year, the Charest government introduced Bill 103 in order to eliminate “bridging schools” while still allowing additional access to English schools.

“We still have to look at all the details, but in principle Bill 103 provides us with access to an increased demographic,” Jonathan says. “If a child comes here for three years and applies for a certificate, in 90 per cent of cases that child will get a certificate.

“I think we should be putting forward the case that our schools are no longer a barrier or a threat to the French language, that at Selwyn House in the Elementary School up to 60 per cent of your son’s education is in French. We need to get out there and tell people what Selwyn House is, and that it’s not the Selwyn House of my generation.

“We have to promote the positives. I’ve had the privilege of working with the faculty on a number of things, and you learn from those situations how competent and committed people are. Their commitment to knowing the students, having fun with the students and being part of the school echoes at all levels and on all floors of this building. So that’s what makes Selwyn House a really great school.”