Sisters-In-Law Found New Private School Evergreen Education Beginning this September

Teachers and sister-in-laws Kayley Dunn and Sarah Dunn are opening a new private school Evergreen Education located at the Edmison Heights Baptist Church basement and are accepting enrollments for September.

Teachers Kayley Dunn (left) and Sarah Dunn (right) prepping for the next school year as they will open their private school Evergreen Education this September. Both of their husbands are brothers. Photo by David Tuan Bui.

The school is accepting children from kindergarten to grade three and looking to get around 22 students total with classes of no more than 15 students, enrolled for the upcoming school year.

Kayley and Sarah focus on self-paced and ‘mastery-based’ learning rather than every child learning at the same rate.

“Teachers are teaching students at their level and so if you have a big class of 26, the idea is that that teacher is meeting all those 26 students' needs because they're not all necessarily at the same academic level,” explained Sarah. “That's really hard to do and it's not the teacher's fault, there's so many things at play. Each student in our class will have their own tracking system, their own goals each day and so they know where they are in their learning.”

Both teachers want to teach self-awareness, others-awareness, social skills and empathy to the children in ‘emotional intelligence.’

“We have a whole curriculum we're following, exercises and a chunk of time every morning designated for emotional learning for students,” said Sarah. That's also unique to our school and our program and outdoor education.”

"It won't just be outdoor play, we will be teaching our subjects outside and integrating outdoors throughout,” said Kayley.

The idea of the school stemmed from both women spending time together since both their husbands are brothers. Two duo had their children and maternity leave around the same time and collaborated on the idea. It was inspired from the COVID-19 pandemic as several children had alternate learning conditions and restrictions placed for a few years that could not give students the full school experience.

“We also saw a lot of gaps in the learning as we went back from the pandemic, seeing so many kids grade levels behind or above because home life was different for everyone,” explained Kayley. “We looked at the system right now and how everything's being taught and were, 'we could close those gaps so easily with a different model of teaching.’”

Sarah and Kayley wanted to deliver quality education at Evergreen to Peterborough in the same respect as they would want their own children to receive.

“I wanted to give my kids a quality education and felt like Sarah and I could give them that,” explained Kayley. “We felt like we could actually do a wonderful job at providing a quality education to everyone.”

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