Lambrick Park Secondary School

Programs

In addition to courses in English, mathematics, history, science and social studies, the school has programs in business and technical education, physical education, fine arts, computing and home economics. Lambrick Park offers four years of French and three years of Spanish instruction. School is in session from 8:30 a.m. to 3:15 p.m.; each class period is 65 minutes long, with five such periods daily Mondays through Thursdays. On Fridays, classes finish early at 1:45 p.m.; each class remains the same length, but the fourth period is gone, and only four class periods are taught.

There is a school concert choir and a chamber choir, led for many years by Karen Hughes, and a band program led by Bruce Ham, a math instructor who has taught at Lambrick Park since 1997.

The school also has an active athletic program, with sports including badminton, basketball, baseball, field hockey, golf, tennis, rowing, rugby, soccer, swimming and volleyball, as well as cross-country and track and field. As the school mascot is a lion, the sports teams are generally named either as the Lions or Pride.

Lambrick Park High School also hosts the Diamond for Excellence program. This academy provides on-the-field instruction in baseball and softball skills and in-the-classroom instruction in five specific areas intended to enhance student athletes' knowledge, understanding, and appreciation of the science of sport and training as it applies to baseball and softball.

Student academic performance

Lambrick Park graduates have often been awarded scholarships to universities in British Columbia and elsewhere; for example, Garrett Smallpene was chosen as the recipient of the $1,000 Rose Lenser science scholarship in 2010. In addition, outstanding graduates have received prestigious B.C.- and Canada-wide awards. In 2008 Jinru (James) Yang won both the University of Toronto National Book Award and the BC Innovation Council Science Achievement Award. In 2009 a second Lambrick Park student, Teresa Roney, once again earned the Governor General's Bronze Medal; the Bronze Medal in 2010 was shared by Lisa Harris and Angela Harris.

Volunteering, fundraising and charitable activities

Lambrick Park students have offered their time in volunteer projects that build citizenship and empathy; in 2011 twenty students volunteered for some of the 300 Greater Victoria non-profit groups supported by Volunteer Victoria. A Lambrick Park student group has raised money to support a Free the Children project to construct a school and improve public health in Chismaute, a small village near Guamote, Ecuador. Through events both serious (a "30 hour famine" and a "water walk", to build empathy for people living in the Third World) and silly ("Tape the Teacher to the Wall", in which students purchased lengths of duct tape to literally fasten four teachers temporarily to the wall), students raised a total of $11,500 for the cause in 2011. In 2011 Lambrick Park was also one of several Canadian schools where the sponsoring Toskan Casale Foundation made available a $5,000 grant to a charity selected by the students. Participating students had to identify a local charity, visit that charity to learn about their work, and make a presentation to their classmates to justify why that charity ought to receive the grant. Students and teachers voted the presentation of Tyler Vanderhayden and Jessica Almendares as the best one, and the cheque for $5,000 was presented to Victoria's Mary Manning Centre, which supports the recovery of children who have been abused.