Recognized as one of Manitoba's Top Employers (2025):
By Richard Yerema and Kristina Leung, Mediacorp Canada Inc. staff editors (Mar 10, 2025)
Here are some of the reasons why St. John's-Ravenscourt School was selected as one of Manitoba's Top Employers (2025):
- Located on a 23-acre campus on the Red River, employees at St. John's-Ravenscourt School can stay active with free access to a fitness centre (with trained staff), three gymnasiums, a movement studio, winter equipment such as cross-country skis and snowshoes available to borrow -- additional activities include a weekly staff hockey night from October to April and informal walking groups
- St. John's-Ravenscourt School supports employees' mental well-being with benefits coverage for mental health care, up to $1,200 per year
- St. John's-Ravenscourt School supports new moms with maternity and parental leave top-up payments (to 90 per cent of salary for 17 weeks), and offers parental leave top-up payments for new dads and adoptive parents (up to 90 per cent of salary for 10 weeks) -- employees may also extend their leave into an unpaid leave of absence
St. John's-Ravenscourt School offers excellence to all
Travis Thomas always felt like the leadership at St. John’s-Ravenscourt School valued its employees, but he saw how true this is during the pandemic.
“When schools had to close in March 2020, being an hourly employee, I was essentially in a layoff position. The school chose to pay us right through to our regular layoff date at the end of June,” says Thomas, a chef in the food services department. “I don’t think many employers would continue to pay employees when they didn’t have to. It really made me see how this is a company that wants to take care of us.”
Thomas has worked in the Winnipeg independent school’s kitchen for 38 years and says he especially enjoys training new hires. “But it’s not just in the kitchen,” he says. “I could walk out of this office and see any administrator or any teacher and have a conversation. The camaraderie is unreal.”
Thomas also appreciates the school’s generous benefits package, which includes a coveted defined benefit pension plan, which provides a predictable amount of income at retirement based on an employee’s salary and years of service. This differs from today’s more common defined contribution pension plan, where the final pension amount depends on the value of contributions and investment growth.
As deputy head, finance and operations, Jillian Lamothe oversees administration of these benefits. “We really strive to ensure that our pension and our benefits are comparable to what a person would experience if they were teaching in the public school system. And we apply the same principles to all of our staff, not just faculty,” she says. “We want to have a strong pool of people working with us and we want people to be happy to be here, because that helps us deliver our programs of excellence.”
Lamothe, who just celebrated her 25th anniversary with the school, says it is important to her to work for an organization that is mission driven. For St. John’s-Ravenscourt School, this means “inspiring academic excellence, creative expression, active healthy living and social responsibility in order to develop compassionate and confident individuals,” she says.
“In my role, which is behind the scenes, I get opportunities to see the benefits of what the school is doing and to work with the students, for example teaching financial literacy to Grade 12 students or providing feedback to business students on their business cases. Those are very meaningful to me as a way of bridging my skill set into a mission-driven organization.”
The school offers that opportunity to all support staff, who might be found coaching sports or helping with dramatic productions. It all helps foster that camaraderie that Thomas appreciates.
“I tell people all the time, I love what I do, I love my job. It's a great place to be,” he says. “I work hard, my day goes fast and I work with great people. People say, ‘you’re 61 years old, you’ve been there 38 years, maybe it’s time to think of retiring.’ Why would I want to retire when I can come here and work in this environment?”
