Barrie Sketchley

Barrie Sketchley died on 14 October 2026 at the age of 85. Rosedale Heights School of the Arts announced the death of its founding principal that day. The cause and place of death were not made public.

Joseph Ghassibe wrote to the school community that they would miss Barrie's leadership and the stories of his life. Tributes from former students, parents and colleagues followed across Toronto. The school community said it planned a celebration of life in the months ahead, with details to be confirmed.

Public accounts of Barrie Sketchley's childhood and family background are limited. What is clear from tributes and earlier profiles is that he came of age in the mid twentieth century: current RHSA principal Joseph Ghassibe recalled Sketchley telling stories of taking his first commercial flight to the United Kingdom in 1957.

He began his career in Toronto classrooms in 1965. Looking back decades later, he said he had never wanted to do anything else. That early commitment set the course for a working life spent entirely in public education in Toronto.

Before Rosedale Heights, Sketchley worked elsewhere in the Toronto District School Board system, including a vocational business school for girls and the Urban Studies Centre. More than three decades before his death he helped found Rosedale Heights School of the Arts and became its founding principal, a post he held for 34 years. In all he spent 42 years in TDSB administration, making him the board's longest serving principal.

Under his leadership the school developed a reputation for inclusive, creative arts education. In 2005 Maclean's Magazine named RHSA one of the best arts focus high schools in Canada and one of the three best special focus schools in the country. He was known to read specialised school applications himself rather than rely only on a central lottery, looking for a student's passion for the arts.

In 2023 the Toronto School Administrators Association recognised him as the longest career principal in TDSB history and, by that association's account, in the province of Ontario. In June 2025 the board announced he would be transferred to Harbord Collegiate Institute for 2025-26, a year before his planned retirement. Students walked out, and parents and the advisory council pressed for him to stay. In August 2025, following direction involving the provincial supervisor at the TDSB, Superintendent Jennifer Chan confirmed he would remain at Rosedale Heights until retirement in June 2026.

Details of Sketchley's private family life were not widely published in the obituaries that followed his death. Colleagues instead emphasised the habits and stories that staff and students knew him by: ski trips, road trips, and an easy warmth with young people. Joseph Ghassibe described missing his smiles, his love and his stories of the life he had led. Parents who fought the 2025 transfer said he had built one of Toronto's most inclusive and creative high schools.

Sketchley is remembered as the longest serving principal in TDSB history and as the founding leader who turned Rosedale Heights into a widely recognised arts school. Current principal Joseph Ghassibe called him a pioneer who empowered staff to make RHSA a place where all identities were included and affirmed, and said his legacy was one of empowerment and a belief that children are the future.

The 2025 campaign to keep him at RHSA until retirement became a public measure of how strongly the community valued that continuity. Katrina Matheson, chair of the school advisory council, called the reversal a recognition that students' voices had been heard. His career spanned more than sixty years from his first classroom in 1965 through retirement plans in 2026.