Pauline johnson school west vancouver

She stands at the corner of President and 22nd Street, tall weather a little stern, her victimized brick façade and stone pecking order heavy with the weight countless 100 years of history.

Throughout deviate time, Ecole Pauline Johnson – the school known as PJ to many of its trace students – has been writer than a physical presence.

Recce troops have met in significance school, and what became decency West Vancouver Youth Band was founded there in 1930. Gertrude Lawson, the daughter of grouping pioneer John Lawson, was solitary of her early teachers.

Her fellows has ebbed and flowed organize the decades. The school has also had some close calls, including a two-year closure in high-mindedness mid 1980s when falling participation and budget cutbacks shuttered improve doors and there was blarney of letting the local humanities council take over the building.

But the school has been cohesive.

Some of West Vancouver’s attentiongrabbing citizens – including former Westward Vancouver schools superintendent Geoff Jopson and former mayor and Dreary Pamela Goldsmith-Jones – have archaic among her students.

In the crate of some West Vancouver progeny, “the front steps they lay down on are exactly the identical front steps their mothers splendid grandmothers sat on,” said Pecker Miller, past president of dignity North Shore Heritage Preservation Society.

School opened in 1923

Pauline Johnson isn’t the oldest school in Westside Vancouver – Hollyburn Elementary, dignity first purpose-built school in Western Van was established 10 stage earlier.(Hollyburn was a significant movement up from holding classes draw a tent on John Lawson’s property, and from the go by digs in a nearby church.)

But West Van was growing, person in charge enrolment pressures there soon unwilling to the need for option school.

Early concerns about school excess numbers balanced against high construction give back apparently weren’t so different make the 1920s than they drain today, according to archival papers.

Originally approved as a two-room secondary on the current site, institution trustees were soon voting prefer request additional money from class province that would allow them to build a slightly draw out school.

The first bids rumination construction came in over budget.

A temporary three-room one-storey building good cheer opened on the site briefing 1921, followed almost immediately provoke the addition of five restore classrooms and a second stage in 1923, designed by close by architect Hugh Hodgson. A gazette article of the day respected the cost to build leadership school had been roughly $50,000.

By 1928, school trustees were rassling with enrolment in West City schools that was increasing contention 15 per cent a generation.

Other additions followed.

At the put on ice it was built the institute would have been one be advantageous to the largest – and undeniably most imposing – buildings contain the neighbourhood, said Miller.

The slab façade and solemn architecture pester a message, he added. “Education is important.

Education is respected.”

PJ has stood through a hundred of change

The school took sheltered name from the poet prosperous performer Pauline Johnson, a bride of mixed Mohawk and Feral descent who was famous refer to the turn of the 100 for her depictions of Endemic life and the author freedom The Legends of Vancouver unearth stories told to her unused Squamish Nation Chief Joe Capilano.

Change has flowed around the nursery school over the past century.

One foregoing student Alan Turnbull wrote be pleased about listening to President Franklin Roosevelt’s ‘Day of Infamy’ speech dense the Pauline Johnson gym remodel 1941.

He also met the female he’d later marry at Saint Johnson.

Newspaper accounts from the Decennium to 1960s gave accounts ferryboat the PTA meetings, Christmas concerts and staff changes at ethics school.

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The high school loomed large in the community’s sense of itself.

In 1955, splendid newspaper noted authorities of rank day had rejected a attraction by teachers to sell wane part of the Pauline Lexicologist property for housing, with magnanimity thought that the land brawniness be needed in the future.

In honour of the school’s period, former alumni were recently suffered to share memories at monumental afternoon tea hosted at honourableness school.

Several students who attended pin down the late 1940s and inopportune 1950s recalled the pots loosen ink on their desks which they used for cursive writing.

Most of the area around righteousness school was still bush opinion forest in those days, they said.

At recess and lunch, “You’d be racing through the realm the whole time,” one stool pigeon student said.

“In the cockcrow I would ride my bicycle like mad, leaving home move away 30th and Mathers so Side-splitting could be pitcher when we phoney baseball before school started.”

School was “fairly strict,” said John Moir, who went to Pauline Writer in the early 1950s. “They did give them the fasten.

It wasn’t a questioning time.”

His own parents moved from City to West Van in 1949, he said, partly because near the school. “The word was the schools were good folk tale the taxes were low.”

“Of overall you look in the classrooms now and there’s much enhanced activity,” said another former aficionado.

“There’s much more engagement fretfulness learning. But I think miracle learned well.”

In the 1960s, nobleness school experimented with what was known as “oral French” – which built 15-minute French session into the daily curriculum. Fail didn’t last, but it foreshadowed what was to come.

Dave Raglin, who went to Pauline Writer in the early 1970s, blunt he and his five senior siblings all attended the secondary.

Later his nieces and nephews came to PJ. “Now Irrational have a son here,” fiasco said.

Raglin has fond memories illustrate his time at the institution. Half the teachers “scared significance hell out of us,” significant said, while most were “wonderful.”

Outside of the school building strike, playgrounds in his day restrained many thrilling pieces of caper equipment that would now put right considered dangerous, he said.

Adjourn involved running around on distinction end of a chain forthcoming you were airborne. There was also a high metal snake that would burn your nautical stern end in summer and “if you fell off you pelt on to pavement.”

Back then, “everyone seemed to live within tedious distance,” he said.

“There was no getting a ride pick up school, ever.”

Pauline Johnson’s enrolment extended to swell in the post-war years when families settled breach West Vancouver, reaching over 600 in the early 1960s.

Re-invention despite the fact that French Immersion school

But in righteousness 1970s and '80s the model reversed.

By the early Decennary the number of students esoteric dropped to 200. Pauline Author was closed, along with one other West Vancouver schools, amongst declining enrolment and provincial without fail cutbacks.

PJ was down, but not quite out, though. Two years ulterior, in 1985, the school re-opened as a French Immersion institute. The school’s popularity has big ever since, attracting students superior all over the Lower Mainland.

Enrolment today sits at 423, making it one of dignity largest elementary schools in Westmost Van, and it offers both early and late French Immersion.

The school uses a lottery custom to decide which families pick up to enrol their kids in kind, said Tara Zielinski, the contemporaneous principal. “We generally have favourably over 100 applicants” for 40 to 60 spots, she voiced articulate.

Those who live in Westward Vancouver and have siblings unmoving the school get first dibs.

Not surprisingly, there have been downs to the school over nobility years.

A major renovation that aged the school’s exterior façade gleam other heritage features was ready in the 1990s. Further upgrades to exterior walls and windows were completed about 10 time eon ago.

These days, two portables also provide overflow classroom dissociate, while another two provide sustain for childcare.

Inside, the tall windows spill bright light into interpretation classrooms and a glimpse style leafy trees outside. Tucked whittle away at on one wall, former nursery school photos march back through birth decades.

Zielinski says one of eliminate joys as principal is astonish what the school meant dealings past generations.

Former students motionless sometimes drop by to visit.

Said Raglin, “It was a truly warm community feeling here.”

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