The History of Education in
Sackville Schools
Prepared by Michael D. Smiley
An Introduction on
Early Education: Schools through the 1800’s
Thirty years after the founding of
Halifax in the 1700’s, a debate waged over who should receive an education. The
upper classes naturally favoured educating the more well-to-do families, as
they felt that if the lower class youths were educated, it would cause a
greater financial burden on the upper class.
In paying for the education of their own children in private academic
institutions, the wealthy felt they were doing their part for the education
system and in educating society. The upper class minority felt there was no
need for the lower classes to be schooled. Even the poorer citizens of Nova
Scotia were not always overwhelming supporters of compulsory education.
Poorer families feared that if they
accepted the idea of their children going to school, they themselves would have
to shoulder the burden of the cost. For many families this was not a
possibility, as many families of that time were hard pressed for cash, and
school was not a luxury most families could afford. In part, this is why the
politicians were apprehensive in taxing citizens for the impartation of
knowledge.
Much debate continued on the topic of education in Nova Scotia
up until the middle of the 1800’s when Joseph Howe, the father of responsible
government spoke on the issue of educating the masses. He stated:
…The subject of education in a province like Nova Scotia is one of
the
most important which the
legislature can be called upon to consider.
Compare with it questions of roads and fisheries, and of politics sink
into
insignificance. Or as the member of Yarmouth who sits beside me has
just suggested, these are intelligent – if they are educated – they will
not
be without the means of raising money, of making roads, of forwarding
enterprise and regulating matters of trade. Among the uneducated
nothing is established or firm, and the spirit of self-sacrifice-so
necessary
for the wise management of public affairs-is wanting.
Howe
was correct in pointing to the obvious, that an education is the foundation for
a prosperous society. Joseph Howe’s speech opened the eyes of many Nova
Scotians in realizing the importance of an education for every child.
Whether the public was ready or not, in
1865 a law was passed taxing lands to support staffing, instructional aids, and
the construction, restoration, and maintenance necessary for schools to exist
in populated and remote areas.
Schools in the 1800’s were reasonably
sized. The structures ranged from 30x30 frames to 10x16 log cabins. There could
be as many as 140 students in a school with just one teacher. A community’s
inability to sustain more than one teaching position resulted in the large
class sizes. In years gone by schools were really community places, with
students of all ages mixed together in a positive learning environment.
A typical mid-1800’s schoolhouse in Nova Scotia would be
filled with iron and wood two-seater desks. The teacher’s desk would most
likely be at the centre of the room, and may have even been a rolled-top desk. Near
the teacher’s desk would be the dreaded strap, much feared by rowdy tots. The stove was usually near the rear of the
building, and besides keeping the pupils toasty, it sometimes provided
delicious treats like hot cocoa. Subjects studied would have included spelling,
reading, arithmetic, geography and grammar. Electricity was still not available
to schoolhouses, and therefore when light became insufficient, classes were
periodically cancelled to the delight of the children.
The curriculum, unlike in the schools of
today, did not occupy a lot of the teacher’s time. Teachers chose simply what
would be taught, when, at what level and how. With schools spread over such
large distances, education officials would not make regular rounds to every
school.
The annual Christmas pageant was always popular in
communities, and especially popular in the smaller ones. In late fall classes
would be cancelled so that rehearsals could begin for the Christmas
festivities. In most cases the annual event would be held in the school. In
Sackville, Acadia Hall showcased the annual pageant of Christmas melodies. To
help defray costs fudge was sold to those people in attendance. Few people could resist the sweet taste of a
treat during intermission.
Students always had time off, but it was not during set
periods such as today’s March Break. Whenever there was work to be done at
home, parents simply had to send in a note to excuse a child’s absence from
school. Such unpredictable attendance
made students fall behind, but the school schedule was adjustable and a child
did not necessarily have to complete a grade in one year. At times some
children finished more than one grade in a year. Overall the system of
schooling was very flexible and regularly met the needs of the community. There
were schools that even had a yearly Arbour Day, whereby the students gave back
to nature by planting a tree or trees in their community.
The History Behind
Sackville’s Education System
Sackville reportedly had a school in
the area in the early 1800’s.
At that time the operation of
schools in the province fell into the hands of the different religious
denominations. There are many references to the community’s first school
associated with the history of the St. John’s the Evangelist Anglican Church,
whereby missionary priests who came to the area provided a teacher, and looked
after the pastoral duties of the community. Obviously at a later time schools
were built in different areas and some references are occasionally taken from
other writings of schools and their locations.
The Reverend G. Gray, and wardens George
Fultz and Thomas Mitchell of the St. John Evangelist Anglican Church in 1809
requested that the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia, Sir George Provost,
provide for a grant of land to be set aside in Sackville for the construction
of a school and glebe. The petition had the support of Bishop Charles Inglis on
July 3, 1809. Provincial government official Charles Morris surveyed the
land and approved a lot in September of 1810. The original location of where
the school was to be built is a little questionable. Records at the Nova Scotia
Public Archives provide the following information on Sackville’s first school:
The Court of General Sessions of the
peace for the County of Halifax certify to
your Excellency (Rt. Hon. George Earl
of Dalhousie, Lieutenant Governor of
Nova
Scotia) that a schoolhouse has been actually provided in the township of
continued ever since.
Stephen Blair, the man referred to in the
above document was sent to Sackville by the Society for the Propagation of the
Gospel in Foreign Parts to be the first schoolmaster. This organization was
connected with the Anglican Church. He reported in 1828 that the school was
eighteen feet by fifteen feet. The school had seventeen children in all, but a
chronic attendance problem existed with the older boys who were always out in
the fields. The school remained open until 1899 when a new school was
established at the opposite side of the school grounds, that being the Lower
Sackville School.
The community of Beaver Bank followed
Sackville’s need for a school and received it in 1865. Beaver Bank grew to need
a second school by 1886. Lucasville required a school as well, and one was
opened to meet the community’s needs in 1876. By the middle of the 1830’s
Sackville needed two schools, one for the lower half of Sackville, and another
in what was to become Upper Sackville.
The area of Middle Sackville today was
much like the other areas in the community; residents there also desperately
needed a school in which their children could attend. One early report suggests
that a school was most likely located in Middle Sackville near
the site of today’s
Sackville United Baptist Church. There
is also reference made to the Bambrick residence. The times in which the family lived at select dwellings varied
over the years making it difficult to pinpoint the exact location of the
residence, which may have served as a school.
With the uproar over the compulsory
education system in Nova Scotia, Sackville residents were worried about
financial costs associated with the government’s plan on education in the
mid-1800’s. Area residents decided to take matters into their own hands; Sackville
parents (for the most part) wanted an education for their children, but worried
about the potential costs.
A meeting was held in 1864 to elect a board of trustees, plan
the construction of a schoolhouse and lay the groundwork for employing a
teacher. A man by the name of Jacob Shonamon was chosen to be the chairman of
the school committee in Sackville, in addition to being a school trustee. David
A. Nicholson and Donald McKenzie were also named as trustees. In all there were
five trustee positions to be appointed. The Number
Nine School District, which consisted of North Beaver Bank, voted on
building a school, maintaining a schoolhouse and on supporting the hiring of a
teacher in a unanimous vote. Mr. MacKenzie was contracted to build the schoolhouse
for the sum of forty-seven dollars. The completion date for the project was
scheduled for May 1865.
During the construction phase of the school project in Beaver
Bank, a Mr. T.W. Nicholson was hired for five months to teach the children.
Trustees agreed to pay Nicholson fifty dollars, meaning ten dollars a month for
the whole term, lasting five months. MacKenzie was not able to make the
deadline set for the school building, as a result Mr. Shonamon offered the use
of one of his barns for forty cents a month until the school could be
finished. After much coaxing the money
to pay the bills to meet expenses were eventually collected from area
residents.
The stories surrounding Sackville’s education
system are widespread, from travelling in the nippy days of February to
recalling the memory of hearing fingernails scrape across blackboards. It is in
hearing these types of stories and the histories of the schools themselves that
one realizes how Sackville schools have been rather special and different from
the rest in the province.
A Selected History of Some of Sackville’s Oldest Schools
In addition to the typical grade schools in Sackville a
finishing school was situated in Beaver Bank. Four sisters operated the Grove
School, originally located in Halifax, sometime before 1840. The oldest Grove child, who was the head of
the school, died in 1879. A year later the school closed. A short time after
the three remaining Grove sisters moved to Beaver Bank to re-establish the
school.
The Grove School operated sometime into the 1890’s as a
finishing school. A finishing school was a school for young ladies of prominent
and well-off families. The cost for children under the age of twelve was sixty
dollars and included studying in reading, grammar, arithmetic, history,
geography, natural philosophy, English composition and French. For older
children to attend the school, parents had to pay eighty dollars. These
children ended up taking the same subjects as the younger ones primarily, but
also studied such things as drawing, botany, rhetoric (the art of communication
in words), algebra and Italian. Music lessons were available for an extra forty
dollars a year. This school was just one of several schools in the Sackville
area by the 1890’s. The Grove School, like the Lower Sackville School, was well
known in the community.
A Brief History of the Lower Sackville School
There are some residents in the community
who can remember attending Lower Sackville School, which was built in 1899. For
many area residents it is this school that many of our older citizens remember
as being the school that existed for most of the twentieth century in the
community. It was situated on what was once
Schoolhouse Lane, now known as the Sackville
Cross Road. At the end of its life, the building was a two-room school, with
the second classroom constructed in 1929. The entire structure was torn down in
1986. To ease the overcrowding at the Lower Sackville School on the Old
Sackville Road, the grade levels had to be split up into two buildings in 1942.
Grades one through four stayed at the school, while students in five to eight
moved to the Acadia Hall (built in 1923) for their lessons. The Lower Sackville
School operated until 1948, the year the Acadia School was built and opened.
The Acadia School was built as a four-room schoolhouse in 1948 as an adequate means
to house Sackville children for their studies.
The Life of the Middle Sackville Schoolhouse
The Middle Sackville School was built sometime around the
mid-1800’s and operated until 1949, when a new school was built for the
community of Middle Sackville. The school was used for nearly a century. The
building and the teaching that occurred within its walls were of great benefit
to the community.
The school was built on the Old Sackville Road, snugly put at
the foot of Shay Hill, and surrounded with
trees and homes on encompassing lots. Like the school, Shay Hill has an
interesting history; the hill received its name from an incident with a
one-horse shay that had the misfortune of breaking down during a severe winter
storm, leaving the driver stranded (often how the students must have felt with
little around them at recess).
The Middle Sackville School was able to accommodate forty-five
pupils from grades one to eleven in the later years of the school’s operation.
The strap and the hardwood pointer were prominently displayed at the front of
the room, and served as a grim reminder to students of what to expect if they
became naughty boys and girls. Minor
offences would warrant a student to stand in a dusty corner. Rows of double
desks were situated throughout the room. The majority of the desks had the
names of former students carved into the wood, leaving their mark in the school
so to speak. The older children
sat at the back and the younger ones near the front. Typically on the first day
best friends would choose to sit
together, and the arrangement usually lasted as long as they behaved
themselves. The front and sidewalls of the school were covered in blackboards.
The boards were often hard to read, as lighting at times during the school year
made it difficult to read and copy notes. Electricity was not added to the
building until the mid-1930’s.
At the back of the Middle Sackville School was a large
cast-iron stove where hardwood logs would be used to heat the building. The area
around the stove would be a place to dry wet clothes on rainy days. On Hallowe’en and Valentine’s Day, it would
be used to make fudge or molasses taffy, and each child would be responsible
for bringing in a contribution for the small snack.
Each school day would start with a devotional period and the
singing of “O Canada,” followed by a pledge of allegiance to the Union Jack,
personifying a great respect for King and country. The roll call would follow
in the daily routine. Sums were then copied from the board, which was then
normally followed by a hearing lesson. Teachers over the years stressed an
emphasis on good reading; children who failed to meet the teacher’s standards
would be moved to the foot or front of the class. At times students would frantically
wave their arms for permission to go to the outhouse, with the teacher often
ignoring calls, leaving some disastrous results to be cleaned.
Periodically clouds of dust could be seen inside the school as
the teacher had students do gymnastics. Recess was also a popular time for
physical activities. On days when the weather was poor the males in the school
would proceed to the coatroom and play games. The girls, who were never invited
to ever play with the boys, read old books or asked the teacher to write on the
board. On sunny days the girls would indulge in a game of hopscotch, and in the
winter the boys would bring their bobsleds to coast on the hill.
Arbour day (all about paying respect to Mother Nature) was
held once a year at the Middle Sackville School. The daily grind of schoolwork
was put aside for a thorough cleaning of the school with hot water and soap.
The girls were busy in the school scrubbing desks and polishing windows, while
the boys would be on the grounds raking leaves and cleaning up the yard. At
times a tree was even planted to mark the event in May.
A group of concerned parents formed a Home and School
Association for the Middle Sackville School, and accomplished a great deal
during their existence. Their work resulted in the introduction of a hot lunch
program for the children. A music program was implemented for students to gain
a greater appreciation for the arts. Outside of the school’s work to promote a
music program, extracurricular activities started to develop with the scheduled
Friday events of the Junior Red Cross. The female pupils would learn
embroidery, while the males would make useful things out of wood. Time was even
spent preparing for end-of-year activities, and many eyes were teary during sentimental
recitations and in saying fond farewells to the older children.
The Middle Sackville School provided
students and staff with a wonderful learning environment in which to grow and
be taught. The school served its community for almost a century. Many
generations of families attended the school. It was in thanks to the trustee,
who acted as secretary, that the school was kept operational. It was this
person who had to collect the school tax to maintain the building, and was
responsible for ensuring the teacher was paid the amount according that their
teaching license required.
Middle Sackville School was located near
the site of the present Lind Forest subdivision and the burial crypt of the
Olands family. With Sackville becoming
home to so many new families, each year fewer of the community’s residents are
aware of the site of where the Middle Sackville School once stood.
Unfortunately the history of this school, like so many others in the area, is
becoming an unknown quantity to area residents. Another school bearing the same
name was opened to serve a whole new generation of residents after 1949 for a
much shorter time.
The Maxwell School Story
A man by the name of James Maxwell donated land in 1917 for a
school to be built. On the second day of the tenth month in 1918 the Maxwell
School opened. Dot Maybee was their
first teacher at the school. Seven Maxwell children attended the school in the
initial year of operation. The school
year would have lasted from the last week of August to the end of June. The
school year usually consisted of two hundred days with the teacher receiving a
salary of two hundred dollars for the year.
In most cases, schools like the Maxwell School ended up with
what was classed as permissive teachers. This was a teacher who did not finish
high school but wanted to teach, and did not have the opportunity to attend the
Truro Normal School to obtain a license. Having such teachers meant they were
able to teach all grades up to (but not including) the last grade that they
passed in school. The majority of permissive teachers functioned well in a
classroom setting and knew their material. Once a teacher was hired on, it was
left to the community to find a boarding place. In addition to finding a place
for a teacher to sleep, a community that ended up with a permissive teacher
also had to find someone to educate the students in areas where the teacher was
unqualified to teach. For instance, the Maxwell School started in 1943
educating high school students at Bedford and then in the 1950’s Bedford became
overcrowded and the children in the high school grades attended Armdale School.
The Maxwell School grew in size over the years. The school
register of 1934 indicates that fifteen students were enrolled at the school in
all grades. Only half of the students would still have been there by the
summer. In 1942 the school discontinued offering Grade 11. A year later Grade 9
and 10 students were sent to Bedford for their schooling. The building was
desperately in need of being enlarged by the early 1950’s; in 1951 the school
was given a new foundation and moved to a new location. The total cost of the
move came in at sixty-five hundred dollars. This time Neil Maxwell donated the
land upon which the school was to sit.
With the ending of World War II, the
growth in the Sackville area led to the school board building new schools even
to the point that the Maxwell School was enlarged to accommodate a number of
additional students.
The Pottier
Report of 1955 greatly affected the schools of Sackville. The students of
Lucasville, Middle Sackville and Maxwell schools were all consolidated into the
Sackville Central School system with single grade facilities. With the
construction of Harry Hamilton School, these three buildings were deemed
surplus property. To help cover the costs of junior and senior highs, the
Maxwell School between 1952 and 1956 served the community in a new way. It
became a place for public dances to raise funds to support area schools, in lieu
of an increase in the area rate. New life was born in an old and reliable part
of the community.
The Maroon Hill Children Education Story
In 1796
approximately five hundred black residents of Jamaica known as Maroons arrived
in Halifax. Not having had a school,
the Black population who settled in Sackville bought a condemned schoolhouse
from Lower Beaver Bank and moved it down in sections and rebuilt the building
on a new plot of land in Middle Sackville in 1890.
The school year in the 1890’s had two
terms. One term ran from May 1st to October 30th. The
other term began on November 1st and ended on April 30th. The first school term lasted only six weeks,
as the school was not ready for the scheduled May 1st opening; the school
opened near the first of June. Mrs. Ester Oland taught the initial six-week
term of study.
It would seem that according to the
information still available, the school sat vacant after Mrs. Oland taught,
until the wife of a missionary volunteered to teach the Maroon Hill children.
The wife of Rev. C.S. Freeman taught the white children in the area earlier in
the day and spent the late afternoon educating the black children at Maroon
Hill School. This lasted from about 1906 to 1909. A short time after Mrs. Freeman
worked with the area children, a young lady of the age of fourteen, Ms. Mable
Fenerty, instructed students for two years on a permit only.
A school had been built years earlier for
black children in Sackville, on land belonging to a black family for one
hundred and fifty years. But over the years the influential white citizens
wanted no Maroon settlement children attending school with their children,
leaving the black students without a school in which to attend. The black
students were treated so poorly that they no longer bothered to be present at
the school site. With no black children attending school in the area, it gave
the white majority the right to deny entry for subsequent generations of black
families to be educated.
After the Maroon Hill School was no
longer in use by the black children, a fourteen-year-old boy wandered onto the
property of a Mrs. Pleasah Coldwell.
There he asked if her son was home, and she informed the child that her son was
at school in Bedford. The boy remarked that he wished he could go to school.
Mrs. Coldwell could not
believe the young man when he informed her that he was not allowed to attend
school.
Mrs. Coldwell had just returned from
Western Canada after having lived there for twenty-eight years. She had
returned to live in her grandfather’s house, which happened to be situated next
to the local school building. Taking to heart what the child had mentioned to
her, she offered to instruct the young teen; he was an eager student and
quickly learned to read. The mother of the child in question spoke to Mrs.
Coldwell to see if she would teach her daughter as well. The Black residents spoke
to her about taking in more students, and to become a teacher of the province
in 1942.
By 1942 Mrs. Coldwell had nineteen
pupils. Mrs. Coldwell housed classes in her dining room and kitchen, referred
to as a kitchen school. At that time there were two sections of the first grade
and one section each of the grades four, six and eight. The students proceeded
to learn with great speed and comprehension, and many went home to even teach
their parents how to read!
One of the charming stories of Mrs.
Coldwell’s school was when she had four students, just one girl and three boys;
they asked if they could have a Christmas concert. The children enlisted the
help of fellow family and friends from the ages of five down to
three-and-a-half, and proceeded to learn four carols. The children and their
parents had heard about such concerts, but never actually saw one. Mrs. Coldwell’s
kitchen was turned into a concert venue, and a Christmas tree decorated the
room. What a splendid Kitchen Concert it was during the war years.
Over the years that Mrs. Coldwell worked with the Maroon Hill children
in the 1940’s, a number of her students won prizes in contests and
competitions. One little girl in 1947 won at a public speaking engagement in
1947. By 1949 the children won three first place positions in musical
festivals. Mrs. Coldwell’s students were an eclectic group of fine young men
and women.
B.C. Silver, the inspector of schools for the province once remarked
that Mrs. Coldwell’s children spoke beautiful English, and that the standard of
education in her school were extremely high. She was always pleased at the
performance of her students, and flatly dismissed comments that they had no
brains.
Mrs. Coldwell taught at a time when presumably children were entitled to
a free and accessible education system, regardless of gender, ethnicity or
cultural background.
The community of Sackville can never
forget Mrs. Coldwell, as she was a pioneer in this community; she contributed
enormously to the education of Sackville youths. A price cannot be put on the
amount of work she did, when bigotry and exclusion was an acceptable practice
in educational circles. She was such a fine upstanding citizen to work with
children and families in helping black residents to enjoy the rich pleasure of
the written word. It is as a result of Mrs. Coldwell work and the determination
of her students that Sackville is a little more tolerant, as residents should
always be mindful of what was taken away from a group of children years ago. A
cycle of history whereby certain groups of people do not receive an adequate,
free and accessible education should never repeat itself; the education system
to work properly needs to be accessible to each person in the community.
A Contemporary
Perspective on Sackville Area Schools
The names of schools changed over the
years to reflect the shifting boundaries that formed the Sackvilles. Lower
Sackville, in its earliest days, covered an area from somewhere in the
community of Bedford (which became its own community in 1856) to what is now
the present boundaries of Lower Sackville. The larger land area past the
boundary of Lower Sackville was named Middle Sackville. The Lower Sackville
School added an addition onto their school; a need also grew for the Middle
Sackville School to add an addition onto their school. The Upper Sackville
School also grew by an additional room to meet the demand for increased space.
With all the changes happening locally, talk began of the need for providing a
high school facility for the area.
School inspector B.C. Silver tried very
industriously to have a consolidated school built in the Sackville area between
1947 and 1948. The would encompass all the children attending both the
predominately black schools in Lucasville and Middle Sackville, and the other
students attending the Lower, Middle and Upper Sackville schools. Nothing came of Silver’s many efforts,
though many meetings were held. The primary responsibility for raising money
for school operations completely rested on the community. A common practice in Maritime communities
was to raise taxes locally to cover teacher’s salaries. Schools were operating
on a pretty unstable basis in many areas.
A member of the area school board in the
middle of the 20th century in Sackville had many responsibilities. They
included conducting a public meeting of the residents (ratepayers) to discuss
and vote on important issues. Discussions would include the cost of carrying
water, care-taking duties, whether the older female students in the school
should sweep the floor and if the males should carry the water in, who would
look after bringing in the wood, who receives the contract for supplying the
wood for the school, and other local issues of significant importance. Unless
property was actually taxed in a person’s name, they had no voting power at
meetings. Trustee members had to be ratepayers in the area, and those
non-resident ratepayers owning summer properties were not entitled to vote.
Public meetings were
often held at or near the end of June, and a tax rate would be struck to pay
all the other operating costs of the schools, with the one exception being the
salaries of the teaching staff. It was the duty of the local board of trustees
to find teachers for schools and to do the direct hiring. Rural areas like
Sackville had some trouble attracting the right calibre of candidates to teach
all grade levels, as they were not necessarily able to compete with other areas
that may have offered higher wages, better lodgings and benefits. It was the
counties that guaranteed the teacher’s salary. As a result the rate of the
local area had to bear the expense, and better financial school boards were
able to attract the better teachers. Teachers in charge of ungraded schools had
a strenuous workload compared to others in the profession who worked in graded
classrooms, situated in cities.
The Pottier Report of 1955 changed the
system of education in Nova Scotia. Education became a municipal issue, with
all the assets and liabilities of the local school boards becoming a
municipality’s concern.
Over the years how children in school
were punished has changed dramatically. The strap was commonly used and it was
not until 1967 that corporal punishments like strapping were banned from public
schools. Remote areas were sometimes rebels and used the strap past 1967. Few teachers
liked using the strap, but were limited in ways to discipline disobedient
students.
Bringing up the standard of the school
system was a common topic of conversation, including matters of school facility
construction and looking at the incredible growth that took place in Sackville.
One solution called for the construction of a high school that would service
the western half of Halifax County. At that particular time Fairview, Armdale,
Spryfield and Rockingham were all parts of the County of Halifax and they were
heavily populated. So a school needed to be built to include a facility for all
high school students from the western side of Halifax County via bussing to one
location. Also attending the school would be students from Dartmouth, Bedford,
Sackville and even Hammonds Plains. These students were scheduled to attend
what was to become the Halifax West High School. The school was completed
around 1954 and was overcrowded from the day the school was built.
A group of people got together during
that period of time looking for the building of a high school to serve the
immediate Bedford-Sackville area. The outcome was the construction of Sidney
Stephen High School in Bedford, which was completed around 1959. Sidney Stephen
would house all the students down to (and including) Bedford’s Prince’s Lodge.
The boundaries narrowed over time with the annexation of Prince’s Lodge area to
the capital city.
The building of Sackville Heights Junior
High School in 1964 represented the beginning of school construction in the
area. Following in the coming years was
a tremendous growth of school construction in Sackville. Sackville High School
was proposed and tendered in 1970, and the school opened in 1972 with 42
classrooms. Sackville High opened its doors to Sackville youths primarily,
taking students out of the neighbouring high school in Bedford, Sidney Stephen.
Other schools in the area that were built approximately at the same time and
over the next decade included elementary schools and junior highs, which were:
Sackville Centennial, Caudle Park School, Sycamore Lane, Gertrude Parker,
Leslie Thomas Junior High, Harry R. Hamilton, A.J. Smeltzer Junior High, Smokey
Drive Elementary, Harold T. Barrett Junior High, and Cavalier Drive.
The continued growth of Sackville led to
the overcrowding of many Sackville schools. In order to avoid overcrowding at
Beaver Bank – Kinsac Consolidated School, Beaver Bank - Monarch Drive
Elementary School was opened for classes beginning in 1988. Officials with the
Department of Education determined that a new high school needed to be built to
relieve crowding at Sackville High. A new high school was planned for the
Beaver Bank, Middle and Upper Sackville areas.
Millwood High came into existence after
much planning and operated out of Sackville High for two years on split shifts,
while the new school was being constructed. The newest high school in the
Halifax County – Bedford District School Board opened in the spring of 1989;
the school was to become metro’s smallest public high school. While Millwood is
small in comparison to Charles P. Allen in Bedford and Sackville High, Millwood
to this day remains a spirited and close-knit school. In the year 2000, Beaver
Bank students who had attended Millwood High were moved to a new P-3 high
school in Fall River called Lockview. Great debate waged over the relocation of
the Beaver Bank students, but after much campaigning to remain at Millwood, the
students were moved to a new state of the art building against most of their
wishes in a political decision made by the Halifax Regional School Board.
A Synopsis on the
History of Sackville’s Schools
The community of Sackville has always
prided itself on the schools that it keeps. The education of children is
fundamental in our nation’s growth. Without providing an accountable and just
education system, we are doing a disservice to tomorrow’s children. The history
profiled here is but a short history on the Sackville school system from the
1800’s to more contemporary times. Sackville families over the years have
always been involved with the management and operation of the schools. The
community has been fortunate to a have an unwavering number of teachers to help
guide students in their studies. Whether students attended an 1860’s Beaver
Bank school or a more recently constructed feeder school of A.J. Smeltzer,
everything is and was done with the student’s best interest in mind. In
preparation for this history of Sackville schools, reading and hearing the stories
of children attending to their education is much like taking steps back into
time to see how another generation of children were taught, evaluated and the
atmosphere in which they studied.
