People often reflect back on their school days with fond memories.
The Retired Teachers' Association education heritage committee has brought those memories to print with three volumes of Historical Memories; People, Places, Programs and Services, School District No. 57.
The latest, third volume that features 26 schools, will be showcased during an open house of the committee's new location at Ecole Lac des Bois on Friday between 2:30 and 4:30 p.m.
"A committee formed back in 1995 of retired teachers to try and preserve the history of the schools in the district," said Kris Nellis, member of the committee. As schools were closing the committee wondered what would happen to all their memorabilia, like photos and trophies, depicting the history of each school.
Right now there are more than 10,000 school items archived and catalogued for people to reference at the District Learning Commons, located at the John McInnis Centre.
Each volume of Historical Memories took about two years to complete and features different schools in categories like Gone But Not Forgotten, secondary schools and elementary schools, programs and services.
The late Barb Hall, who died of lung cancer a year ago, was a strong force driving the Historical Memories project, said Nellis.
"Barb worked on the last volume of the book right up until her last days," said Nellis. "I went over to her place one day and got all the things she was working on and talked about the finishing touches and she died that night. It was very sad but she worked so hard on it because it was such a big, important thing to her."
Hall's specialty was writing the histories of the smaller schools.
"She wrote about the one or two room schools that had existed up the rail line or were located at the sawmills that came and went and Barb did the last 15 of those that needed to be done," said Nellis. There are about five that are left to do. The committee knows the schools existed but there is no history on them so it looks like they just might be mentioned in Historical Memories Volume IV.
Volume III includes big schools like South Fort George, Austin Road and North Nechako and there are seven schools featured that are still in existence, including PGSS, with its seven different locations and it takes up about 20 pages of the book alone, Nellis added.
"We are very pleased with the product and try to be fairly visual and the book really only gives snapshots of most of the schools including a little bit of the history, a bit of the activities, class photos, staff photos and some recollections of teachers and students," said Nellis.
For more information call Nellis at 250-562-7125 or Tiiu Noukas at 250-563-2380.
