You Have a Story to Tell
By Larry Kuehn
Have you ever wanted to check up on some event that happened at a school you taught at for many years? Or maybe look at pictures of the students and colleagues you taught with?
Or perhaps you have thought about what your children or grandchildren are going to do with all those things you’ve kept but mean nothing to them once you are gone! What to do now with such papers as: your teaching certificate; your first letter of appointment; your first pay cheque?
Someone in the future with an interest in the education and social history of Vancouver schools will find your papers and photographs useful in making sense of how education has developed and changed in British Columbia. Your past is a part of history and your story can help preserve and inform an understanding of what we have now and how education in BC evolved.
TO FIND the artifacts or DONATE your own contribution that reflects your role in the story of BC education go to the VSB Archives and Heritage website https://blogs.vsb.bc.ca/heritage/
READ ON FOR FULL STORY
A group of retired Vancouver teachers went searching and found the place. Rosalind Kellett, president of the Vancouver Retired Teachers’ Association, organized a visit of a half dozen retirees to the Vancouver School Board District Archives. It is hidden away down in the bowels of the VSB district office on West Broadway and is protected in a large cage requiring fobs and keys to get through three locked doors.
It just looks like a lot of shelves covered with numerous cardboard bankers boxes, along with some artifacts of the history of education such as a Commodore computer and some paintings of old schools. But when history buffs dig into the boxes, one finds remnants of the activities of teachers, students and institutions—shadows of lives that contributed to building our society.
Who is building this archive and looks after it? It currently has four volunteers, most of whom are retired VSB school staff who come in once a week on Tuesday morning to work on making sense of the materials. A major task is creating an inventory of what is there. Boxes of school and district materials are organized with lists created of what is in each box and the lists computerized so the inventory is searchable.
Many filing cabinets hold photographs. Before we all carried phones around with high quality cameras in them, for several decades the VSB had photographers hired to take pictures in schools. As professionals, they took careful note of when, where and what school activity they were shooting and maintained this record of photos in the Accession Books which are also in the Archives; matching photos to the records is one of the main tasks in the current inventory process. These days we fill our phones with photos, most of which will disappear and are seldom documented even if we archive them online somewhere.
Fortunately, you don’t have to descend into the lower reaches of the VSB office to get a better idea of the kind of materials in the archives. Sitting at home you can take a look at the VSB Archives and Heritage Website primarily developed by one of the volunteers, Derek Grant. It can be found at https/blogs.vsb.bc.ca/heritage/.
The website is very rich. It has sections on photographs and on featured stories, as well as short essays on education development in Vancouver by decade, starting in the 1870s, including some context on the social and historical developments of the time
- The photographs section is organized into stories. For example, “Kitsilano High School: Sixty Years in Photographs (1923-1982) and “Carleton Elementary School—Photos from 1914 -1959.”
- A section on “Notable Alumni” lets you know that Ryan Reynolds graduated from Kitsilano, Artist Ken Lum from Gladstone, and Vancouver’s first Black teacher, Barbara Howard and former premier Dave Barrett from Britannia—along with many more.
- The section on “Features” is a mixed bag of interesting materials.
- The test that students had to pass in 1911 to proceed to the final years of secondary school. A glance at the entrance test will show why there were very few secondary graduates in 1911, and one of the questions lets us see some of the changing social conventions:
“(b.) Miss Sarah Althea Sharon writes a letter to a stranger and signs it "S. A. Sharon." The reply is addressed to “S. A. Sharon, Esq." What precaution did Miss Sharon omit to take? How should she have signed this or any other business letter or document?”
One sees from the exam how much memorization was a central part of the pedagogy of the day:
“3. (a.) Name the author of each of the following selections:—The Wonderful One-Hoss Shay; Hart-Leap Well; The Panthers; The Pied Piper of Hamelin; The Days that are No More; The Soldier's Grave; Ax-Grinding; The Bird; The Red River Voyageur; To Melancholy.
(b.) Quote the first stanza of " Hart-Leap Well," or of " The Days that are No More," or of "The Red River Voyageur."
- A history of Oakridge School from 1951 to 1976 demonstrates the tremendous social change that has taken place in the inclusion of all students in our classrooms. The school opened as a separate school after a parent pressured to let her child who was excluded from any school, but who appeal was initially rejected by the board. Section 158 of the Public Schools Act was used in support of the School Board’s position. As “mainstreaming” and then “inclusion” policies opened regular classrooms to students with mental disabilities, Oakridge became a language assessment centre for placement of immigrant students.
How can you contribute to the Archives?
- Explore the website. It will give you an idea of what you have that might be of interest to add to the collection. Let others know about it as well so they can find things that are of interest as well as what they might contribute.
- Volunteer to help out. You can assist in doing the inventory of materials—there are lots of materials still to do. You could work on the general inventory or on the materials from a school where you taught to help organize those materials. And you could write a story—what is the story of your school or of some interesting aspect of the school’s history that could contribute to the Features section.
- Build an archive of a school where you worked. A section of the website has advice on “Building Your Schools Archives” and “Preparing Your School for a Major Anniversary.”
- Donate materials to the Archive.
- If you have items you would like to donate, you have two options. You can send the items directly to the VSB Archives and Heritage Committee by regular mail, or contact them via email to make arrangements to drop off the items at the Vancouver School Board. Make sure you provide a brief statement on your personal connection to the item or items and preferably provide a list of what they are.
Mailing Address:
Vancouver School Board
Attention: VSB Archives & Heritage,
1580 West Broadway, Vancouver, B.C. V6J 5K8
Email Address: heritage@vsb.bc.ca
