First Day of School

The first day of school will be this coming Tuesday September 4, the day after Labour Day.

My elementary school, Cloverdale Elementary, is still there on Highway 10 inbetween 177B Street and 180th Street, but is now known as Cloverdale Traditional School.

When I was going there, about 400 students attended Cloverdale Elementary. Most grades had 2 classes and sometimes there were split classes with a different grade. Cloverdale Elementary was a pink two story school with a blue annex on the other side of the gymnasium. The old horse barn used to be behind the annex and that was where the kids parked their bikes.

The annex was a basement play area split into boys and girls and upstairs were 3 or 4 classrooms, mostly housing grade 4 students. At some point a portable classroom ended up in front of the school. The annex, the barn, and the portable are all long gone.

Some say you'll never forget your first day of school but I have long since forgotten it. I used to keep a red scrapbook with class photos and other things of school. I thought it was on my bookshelf but when I went to look at it just now I couldn't find it. I was trying to remember who my first and second grade teachers were. I remember the names, Mrs. Bell and Mrs. Stewart, just not who was grade one or two. I am pretty sure Mrs. Bell was grade one.

The one thing I remember about Mrs. Bell was that she was a tall woman with a very long neck. She was constantly stroking her neck. When I was little I thought that was how she grew her neck by stroking it. She was younger than most of the other teachers, probably in her late twenties. She was nice enough but I don't remember her being a good teacher. Back then women only had two career choices: teacher or nurse. Teaching probably was not her calling more than what was expected of her. There were probably only 4 or 5 men at Cloverdale Elementary. The principal Mr. Vickery, the vice-principal Mr. Black., two male teachers that I recall in grade 5 and 7, and another man who taught for a year and then moved back to his home country, either grade 6 or 7 and he wasn't my teacher. There was a male teacher who taught the band class but he was from Cloverdale Junior High and only came down once or twice a week for a half hour or so to teach band. That was in grade 5. And then another male teacher took over the band class in grades 6 and 7.

If I could find my old scrapbook with my grade one photo it would show the little girls wearing nice dresses and the little boys wearing bow ties. Styles have changed a lot! In fact they changed a lot during the 7 years I went to Cloverdale Elementary when it became more common for girls to wear pants and then jeans.