Sometimes when the Young family is driving on the Gardiner in their minivan, a Gregorian chant will emanate from the back seat. Or an aria in French, German or Latin.
Panis angelicus fit panis hominum .
This scene isn't taken from an Omen sequel, nor is anyone in the vehicle possessed. Those words come from their angelic-voiced son, Chris, a cow-licked 12-year-old boy who is a student at St. Michael's Choir School. Next month, he will again commute from Etobicoke to downtown Toronto, where he and other boys dressed in tidy maroon and blue blazers will study piano, math and music theory beneath the stone parapets of an unusual – and top-ranked – school.
Though this may seem the plot of Upper Canada College: The Musical, St. Michael's Choir School is nominally a public school, a collaboration between the Archdiocese of Toronto and the city's Catholic District School Board.
A study released this week by the C. D. Howe Institute that used standardized test scores ranked the school as the top in the city.
Located on Bond Street, SMCS does boast some major advantages over other public schools, namely a selective admissions process that allows it to choose 32 boys from a pool of around 400. The $4,000 tuition also helps.
But community members insist its academic success rests on the controversial principle of specialization. Its advocates say that if a child is given a pursuit he wants to focus on, he will succeed. Detractors worry that the schools tear at the social fabric. “Do we want to divide our student populations and the families from which they come?” asks Annie Kidder, executive director of People for Education.
Ms. Kidder also stressed that the Howe survey should not be taken as an absolute measure of success. “What you can tell is that some schools are better at preparing kids for tests,” she says.
St. Michael's Choir offers something different from every other school, said Chris, who is required to study piano, music theory, and don a “red dress” every Sunday when he sings with his classmates at St. Michael's Cathedral. Schools such this, which begins specialized training in Grade 3, are indeed very rare.
Ontario's Education Minister Kathleen Wynne also doesn't put much stock in the C. D. Howe's school rankings, but she agreed that specialization re-engages students. “That's the whole idea: It engages kids.”
Ms. Wynne said that this is why she has worked to expand the number of high schools in Ontario offering Specialist High School Majors, which include everything from arts and culture to mining.
Chris was invited to audition after he sang O Canada for some recruiters. At the time, he was a Grade 2 student at his local Catholic school, he couldn't read music, and he had no idea he could sing.
He also had to pass a rigorous academic exam: The boys spend so much of their day in music classes that keeping up with the regular curriculum can be a major challenge.
Like all his classmates, Chris commits to 80 minutes a day of choir practice, school days that are 30 minutes longer, and singing at Sunday mass.
Parents have their own obligations. Because busing isn't available, they commute to and from cities such as Ajax, Brampton and Oakville.
Then there's the tuition.
That money is earmarked only for the music school, covering costs of items such as piano, organ and voice lessons. Essentially, the music school is a private entity within a public school, a registered charity that serves a cathedral.
The decision to send Chris to St. Michael's has required a few sacrifices. Ron Young works a not-for-profit; his wife is an administrative assistant. For them, $4,000 a year is a lot of money.
At first, Mr. Young said he worried his son might be the poor kid in the class when he first started attending St. Michael's, but he has been pleasantly surprised.
Many of the students – there are about 250 in the grade school and 100 in the high school – come from working-class immigrant families.
Now, as Chris is about to enter Grade 7, he plays guitar, has completed his Grade 3-level piano and knows countless chants, hymns and arias in various languages. (Though puberty has begun to shift his repertoire somewhat, and favourites such as Ave Maria have become more of a challenge.) The only thing he misses from his old regular school is girls.
But it's okay because there's an all-girls high school down the road, so he sees them all the time.
At the Young house, Chris's sister Natalie, who is about to start Grade 10 at Michael Power/St. Joseph High School, slipped away from the room where the family was gathered while her brother sang for a visitor.
When the choruses of Ave Maria and Bist du bie mir were over, she returned. Even though her parents say she has a beautiful singing voice, she is far more shy than her brother about singing.
The visitor asked her, If there were a school for girls like her brother's, would she go?
Her face lit up.
“That would be kind of cool,” she said, “if there was a school like that for girls.”
With a report from Chris Hannay