Being the Change

Karen Elkins - President, Silbury Education and Resource Centre

silbury.ca

by Gayle Mavor

photo by Jaime Kowal

Intense. Sensitive. Creative. Intelligent. Visual/spatial learners. May have learning difficulties. In short: gifted kids. How to spot them? “Exhausted, freaked-out parents,” jokes Karen Elkins, president of Silbury Education and Resource Centre.

Karen should know. The entrepreneur describes her son as “twice exceptional” or “gifted but with learning challenges.”

“On a visit to the Smithsonian Institute when he was three, he could name all the airplanes,” she recalls. “So when anyone tried to group airplanes by colour—not by the actual specifications—he’d get really upset.”

Karen wanted to find an environment where kids like her son would find kinship with each other. In 2004, she stopped searching and launched Silbury. Unity of Vancouver, at 5840 Oak St., is home base. Silbury students learn from a curriculum that meets provincial learning outcomes, but the route they take is as atypical as they are.

“Integration of curriculum, mind, body, and spirit is key,” says Karen.

Silbury’s certified teachers and array of specialists are just as likely to explore art therapy, ecology, and even reiki as they are science and history. Small class sizes (eight to 10) mean the curriculum adapts to the learners.

Karen believes our survival as a species depends on the freedom to activate the potential within each individual. “Silbury is the change that is all around right now in the world,” she says. And like-minded students, parents, and educators are the pioneers.

Her vision? To integrate educational disciplines, industry, health professionals, and related retail establishments in a hub that will transcend traditional lines of education and remediation strategies.

“We are interdependent and interconnected individuals,” Karen stresses, “and our learning environments need to be that way as well.”