I am on the third floor of one of the city’s grand old sandstone schools, Hillhurst. Calgary in 2012 has 221 schools but this is one of my favorites.  Facing south, the large windows look out over the city, the downtown skyline only a few blocks away, across the river.  The big windows to the north look out at the hill, up to the Jubilee Auditorium and the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology..

The room is magnificent, one big expanse, as large as a gymnasium and I imagine at some times in history it was a gym. It was also a public gathering place, an assembly hall in 1913, in the same way that old manor houses often had their entertainment area on the top floor. A school with about this design even housed the first legislature in Edmonton.  McKay school up there, built in 1904 is classic also. I visited the top floor there recently and sure enough there are elegant chairs facing each other at one end of the long room, with a speaker’s chair, a public gallery and with one small row off to the back, the ladies’ gallery.  The idea of government using a school to meet in is in sync with the grandeur of these buildings. 

Here at Hillhurst I’ve been in this top floor room many times. I’ve seen it used for 3 classes of gifted students, 90 kids bustling around doing projects. I’ve seen it other years divided into two classrooms, used as a science workshop and recently as the music room.  This room has seen a lot.

These old schools intrigue me with their steep stairways and no elevators.  With washrooms only in the basement, people must have been pretty fit going up and down the steps each day.  Putting an assembly room on the top floor means the public itself was probably pretty fit and this makes me realize early settlers were generally young and leading a physical labor lifestyle.  Anyone who teaches here gets a cardio workout daily.

The caretaker of this building years ago had to keep the furnace working and lived right on the premises. Sure enough there is a little apartment off to one side of the top floor. The basement of this school has tall ceilings and though the rooms are now for kindergarten and grade one, they have been used at other points in history for woodwork, sewing, dressmaking, even for cooking with a large coal or alcohol stoves. There were military classes held here and most amazing to me, a shooting gallery was here for riflery training.  The hill behind was used for sledding.

I love these old schools. I love their high ceilings, their wood panelled walls, their grand windows with so much natural light. I love the little cubby hole areas, the kids’ cloak rooms, the tiny stairwells that are private and lead to the attic or roof. These sandstone schools have an elegance to them and look like fortresses or castles from the outside. The upper balcony is regal. The schools sometimes even have a clock tower or cupola, fine carvings of stove. Someone really believed that education maters and that a school building should inspire stability and awe.

Everyone who built these sandstone schools  has died but their work lives on. The key feature of these schools is precisely that they were built to last, 75 years in intention but many are still  here after 100.  In 1886 the fledgling community of Calgary had suffered a disastrous fire. Sixteen buildings went up in flames, including wooden frame houses, wooden churches, the city hall clock tower and even, embarrassingly, the fire station. There had been a fire truck but it was locked up and nobody could get it. The people who survived did not want that to be risked every again, and for sure  not where the children were.

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The first actual buildings for schools had been wooden and modest. Mission schools set up for natives to learn western culture operated only sporadically.  As more people arrived, there were suggestions to build schools for local children and not just send them back east.  Not all people wanted to spend the money on a school though. In Edmonton a contentious vote was held with fur traders generally saying it was not necessary and lumberjacks saying it was.  The case was made that having a school would add a sense of decorum, would be a place for social gatherings for the community and that having a school here might attract more settlers.  The yays won the day. Some rules set up.  It was important to place the school appropriately, not near stagnant water or noise, in a field where kids could play.  In Edmonton one school had been inadvertently built over an old coal mine and one day started to cave in.

The first Edmonton school building in 1881 set out offers to tender for the construction.  It had to have a 24 by 30 foot wood frame, be built on the brow of a hill, since school locations prioritized being visible at a distance. It  had to have battened walls, sawdust to fill the cavities, and  be ‘well rammed down’ for warmth.  The school must have a porch, a double inch door,, a roof shingled over tarpaper and a brick chimney.  The floor was made of oil soaked fir.   In 1882 a seven foot fence was also to be built around this school and children were not to play in the school grounds outside of school hours. 

The first Calgary school buildings were one room only, like the design for many rural schools. Earliest designs were for a structure 14 feet by 20 feet.  In Ontario the earliest ones were made of local rock and stone but there was not much rock on the prairies. Settlers here used logs with moss between the logs for insulation. Standard measurements by government were 20 feet by 20 feet according to blueprints from 1910. The cost to set up a typical rural school was about $900. The building had to also have a blackboard, usually slate with the alphabet written along the top. It had to have a teacher’s desk and then desks or at least benches for the students. The desks were in rows and at the back of the room were usually two cloakrooms, one for girls and one for boys.  The early schools had no washrooms but did have outhouses, one for the girls near the school and one for the boys, farther away. The school had to have a washbasin even if it had no running water, because kids had to wash up and some of them would bring pails of water.

Many early schools had big windows  with glass panes and one big door. In 1930 a blizzard pushed so hard against the door of one rural school that nobody could open it to get in and students had to climb in through the window.  The windows could open in most early schools but there were  no screens on them so flies and mosquitoes came in as did other small wildlife like mice.

Rural schools had to have a barn or stable for the horses that children rode to school. We may think of school as a permanent building but in early days it was thought of as temporary, a starter place. School planners often had a dream of a bigger school later and sure enough over time many of Calgary’s early schools were replaced, some moved to a new location, some renovated, some torn down. In 1875 one way to relocate a building was to float it on logs down the river. That is how the first trading post was relocated.

Most of what is today heavily residential was prairie interspersed with small settlements.  In 1884 Mission was its own village and Rouleauville had French names for the streets because so many Quebecers has come there. Calgary itself was only the area south of the Bow River to 17th avenue. Crescent Heights was still federal land.

New schools gradually replace the temporary sites of early wooden schools, and the parlor setting of Mrs. Jacques who taught settler John Glenn’s children in 1882.  They replaced the makeshift settings of church basements, the upstairs of a grocery store, or the second floor of the police station, the curling rink or parts of hotels. If the temporary school location was an old house, kids would now have to give up privileges like going to the attic to play.  In 1887 Central School opened and was a two storey wooden structure but people dreamed of something of stone. East Ward School (later called Alexandra and in Inglewood) was built in 1891 at 9th avenue south east. It was a one room frame building and had 27 pupils.

In 1880 officials who had served with the Northwest Mounted Police after 3 years of service could get a land grant. One of them got land on the banks of the Elbow River 2.5 miles south of Calgary.  One day he discovered a type of yellow rock there. It was unusual because, besides its color, the more time it spent out of water the harder it got. If exposed for a long time under water it would deteriorate and break off into sand so it was named sandstone. The material when dry got so hard though that it could be carved and once hard could certainly withstand very cold temperature or heat. It was also fire-proof. The idea of using sandstone for buildings was exciting and quarries to gather it were set up all around. Laborers dug it up, sawed and chiselled it, carved it by hand, hauled it by horse and wagon to construction sties. There were quarries at the 17th avenue bridge, at Crowchild Trail near the 33rd avenue intersection today, north of the Bow River and one out by Shaganappi. One of the first buildings of this sandstone was the new firehall.

In 1903 a college for boys opened at 15th avenue SW in a two storey house. It was called Western Canada College for Boys. Though it was called a college, it was actually a private high school in the European tradition and was founded through the Northwest Territories government rules before Alberta was a province. In 1904 it was replaced by a four storey school on 20 acres of land at 17th avenue. The land had been donated by the Canadian  Pacific Railway company. The private school was sold to the city in 1926 and additions were made over the years. In 1928 two wings were added.  A fire destroyed the auditorium in 1934  and walls caved in after an explosion  but all people survived. Other additions and renovations came in 1948, 1958, 1960 and in 2011. The school eventually was so old that in 1979 the new principal was the son of the first vice principal the school had.  The motto of the school in the early years was “Where they teach uncommon sense, where you tear your Sunday clothes by shinnying under a fence”.

In 1904 high school students got their own buildings, on 7th avenue SE just behind City Hall. The End of the Line school got nicknamed Sleepy Hollow and it was actually two wood frame buildings linked by a covered walkway. The school even had a hay rack with a watering trough for horses. It had outhouses and no running water.

Rural schools needed weather protection and early settlers tried to create a tree wall or wind guard around them.  In 1904 trees were planted in several school yards for their shade and snow protection but also for their beauty.  An early priority too was to keep animals out of the school playground. A fence might be made of split rails, stumps, willow branches woven through each other, or of stiles. Every school needed a play area and kids and teachers helped pick rocks and weeds to set up a baseball diamond.   Even as late as 1943 in Calgary you could get to Belfast school two ways – one through the front entrance gate and the other through the cattle gate at the back fence.

The floors of schools were usually wood planks, oiled, sometimes black.  There was usually a small storage room with tall windows. In the kids’ cloakrooms were usually coat hooks and then shelves for the lunchroom pails. Even as late as 1958 Alberta had 384 one room schools in rural areas and 5294 students attended them.  The city of Calgary had moved on, but its teachers and some of its students had been in such schools.

Skilled craftsmen came to work on buildings to be made of sandstone and by 1908 half the tradesmen in Calgary were stonemasons. They worked ten hour days for $1.50 to $2 a day.  They built the Palliser Hotel and even the building for the Calgary Herald,  and they made the new city hall. Some of these workmen even made gargoyles for ornamentation.  When war was declared in 1914, most of the skilled workers joined up and the sandstone boom ended. While it has lasted 12 schools were built.  The skill had been so valued that Calgary even entered a sandstone carving in the 1893 world’s fair in Chicago.

.In 1909 some schools  of two floors even got fire escapes. In 1910 the city expanded. A lot of settlements were annexed including Bonnybrook, Highfield,  Stanley Park, Elboya, Crescent Heights, West Hillhurst, Scarboro, Knob Hill, South Calgary, Altadore, Belfast, Riverside, Vista Heights, West Capitol Hill, Capitol Hill, Pleasant Heights, Mount Pleasant, Balmoral Tuxedo Park and Mountainview.    The city officially grew then for two reasons- one because people already there were now counted as Calgarians and two, because more and more people were arriving.

Forest Lawn however remained a hamlet with farms around it. Speculators bought up land thinking they would sell it for housing and even built railway tracks in case a leg of the train might come that way, but it never did. In 1911 Ogden and Manchester joined the city as did Roxboro, Grandview (Ramsay), Westmount, Bankview.  By 1912 the city had 104 subdivisions and suburbs, and nearly all of the people in them wanted and expected schools.  Many already had small ones.

Bow View School built in 1912 was in Forest Lawn. It was a two storey wooden frame building.  Glenmore School, also built in 1912 had one room, was made of wood and featured three windows on one side and a covered porch where kids could remove their coats.

Early city builders and many of the rural ones faced a challenge when choosing windows. They had to retain heat in the winter and yet not allow too much heat in the summer. Natural lighting was valued partly because many schools had no other source of light. However if you put up a glass window, it may get broken from baseball games outside or even from horses kicking up stones. Some schools put galvanized tin over the lower windows. The common design for many schools had 3 long windows of four panes each, one set on the north side of the school and one set on the south. The school usually was of logs with a gable roof.  In the 1930s teachers might put in cottage curtains to make the room homey, and would add posters around the walls, often pictures of animals.

The first sandstone schools were small and modest. In 1894 South Ward School was built of sandstone and only had one storey. It had a porch entrance and two windows on either side and was located at 13th avenue and 2nd street SW. It was made of hand-hewn rough faced sandstone and there were two classrooms with long benches and tables, not desks. The school stood on that location till 1975. It was the first school in the city to get electricity and running water when they became available.Between 1901 and 1911 Calgary population went from 4,000 to 44,000. Many of the newcomers had come by train and brought their children.

In 1904 a four room sandstone school was built at Victoria Park at a cost of just under $13,000.  Poplar and balm of Gilead trees were planted in the school yard and in 1907 four more rooms were added. In 1912 six more rooms and an assembly hall were built. The population was growing so fast that by 1919 another school, this time a bungalow school, was built on the northwest corner of the property. The first sandstone building and the addition were torn down in 1961 and the new bungalow school and older parts were what remained in 1962. That school now has official heritage status and has been sublet to a charter school since 1996.  Occasionally trees had to be removed when telephone wires were brought into the school but in 1909 the principle generally was to remove as few trees as possible.

Planners had to balance the need for more and more space, because of more students, with the higher and higher cost of building. Costs were going up astronomically. In 1892 it might have cost $400 to build a school but by 1907 it cost $50,000.

When there were too many students for East Ward school, a new building was built for them, this one of sandstone, in 1906. It had four rooms and then four more were added in 1908. 
When there were too many students for South Ward school a new  building was made in 1906 too. The new building of sandstone had three storeys with ten classrooms, It cost $60,000 to build and was Romanesque style. It had a rock faced sandstone exterior, arched windows, low pitched roof and wide eave overhangs. The older school was used for a time as a workshop, for classrooms, as an ‘annex’ and the two together were renamed Haultain school in 1910.  By 1925 the school had 525 students and was the biggest in the city. The new building was closed in 1962 and completely destroyed by fire in 1964 but the older one was saved. It was declared a historic site. The area was renamed a city park and the smaller building became a parks office at 225-13 Avenue SW.

In 1905 Central school needed more room and rather than add onto it, a sandstone building was made right beside the old wooden one at first street and fifth avenue. The new one, of sandstone, was Romanesque and Classical in design It had 3 storeys, ten classrooms and an assembly area on the 3rd floor. It had a grand entrance and a cupola.  Each classroom measured 30 feet by 30 feet and had a cloakroom and drinking fountains.  In the basement were two playrooms, a furnace room and a washroom, one for boys and one for girls.  The building had electric lights and featured speaking tubes from each room for teachers to talk with each other or the caretaker. The doors and trim were oak and the ceiling was metal. The stairways, on  either end of the building, were made of birch. When Central Public School (later James Short) was built in 1914, a sealed jar was placed in its cornerstone with copies of the daily newspapers  or the time. The corner stone also contained 21 signatures of school staff, 123 signatures of the pupils, four coins and six postage stamps. The building had a clock tower though no clock was ever installed. When the building was torn down in 1969, the cupola was saved and was relocated to a city park.

A sandstone building was built in 1907 to train teachers and was named Calgary Normal School. It later was named McDougall School. It cost $150,000 to build and was Renaissance Revival style with fine stone carving.  It had 3 storeys and an attic, the attic being where the caretaker lived. This attic had small circular windows looking out over the city.  The building had broad granite steps leading up to the triple arched entrance, four freestanding columns at the front and two more at either end. The interior was of carved oak woodwork with moulded plaster.  It served as an elementary school for years, then as school board offices, and since 1987 has been the official site for the provincial government in Calgary. McDougall Centre or Government House became its new name and the public can visit it daily.

In 1908 a high school was built also of sandstone and named Central High, later Central Collegiate and even later Dr. Carl Safran School It was on 13th avenue and 8th street southwest and over its left and right entrances the words Boys and Girls are literally carved in stone.  The Richardsonian Romanesque style gives it two storeys, a basement and an attic, eight classrooms with 12.5 foot ceilings. It had a coal burning heating plant and indoor plumbing, a 72 foot tower, a porch over each entrance and a vestibule opening to a staircase hall inside.  The classrooms each could house 49 students and there were cloakrooms in each classroom, plus separate rooms for male and female teachers.  The space on the top floor was a large assembly hall that could accommodate about 500 people The gym was in Egyptian style.

Riverside school (now Langevin) was built in 1910.  It was at first avenue and 6th street SE  and had 3 storeys. It had an assembly hall on the top floor and a playroom in the basement.  Horses hauled two wheel carts from Samis Hill with sand for the building and some children played in the sandpits on the hill and sometimes ‘borrowed’ the cornice ornaments to use as sleds.

In 1910 Calgary was growing so quickly that the school board decided to build a few two room schools, to be called cottage schools. They were wood frame, usually costing about $5,000 each.  Eventually 17 such schools were built. They appeared in Erlton on 28th avenue, in North Calgary, in Mewata at 10th street SW, near Edmonton Trail on 4th street NE, in west Calgary at 23rd avenue and 55 street SW. They appeared in Elbow Park and Tuxedo Park, placed where they could accommodate overflow students from the area.  The idea was to build a bigger school eventually and to sell the cottage schools as rooming houses.  However by the time the city could afford to build the new schools, the fad of boarding houses in Calgary had passed and most of the cottage schools suffered another fate.  Of the original 17, only a few remain in 2012.  One is in Hillhurst, one in Bridgeland, one in Capitol Hill. The Hillhurst cottage school has the original double hung windows, oak flooring, door, window trim and baseboards, wooden picture rails and side stairwell. It became for a time a maritime reunion centre. 

Erlton Cottage school was replaced. South Calgary cottage was moved. Tuxedo Park cottage was sold to a Bible college and later became a funeral home. La Grange cottage was moved and then renovated to house six rooms. Mewata Park and Grand Trunk Cottage schools were sold to charities and local groups.

When you look at schools built in the 1910s it is interesting to also read that ordinary people were still sometimes living in tents.  In 1911 there were tent houses, some 24 feet by 24 feet with wooden floors, six foot walls and a double fly opening. They had cotton ceilings and even papered walls with flap windows, and were often heated by a wood or coal stove. The people lived in them even through the winter and found that they were sometimes warmer than the early houses. The irony then is that when people paid money to build schools in those days, some of the wealthy had nice houses comparable to the school but most of the people were paying for a building much better than the one they lived in themselves. They had a vision of what a school should be for their children and it was a grand vision.

Connaught school was built in 1911 in the area now called the Beltline on 11th avenue SW.  It cost just under $100,000 to construct and had four storeys. The school has been renovated with a new gym added but still retains original exterior walls, linked by a covered  and heated atrium to the new addition.  The third floor was originally a gym but over the years got used as classrooms. Washrooms were in the basement  only, a common design for early schools and next to them was a concrete play area for when the weather was cold.

There were only a few basic floor plans for the sandstone schools. One with 11 rooms was used at Early Grey in 1911 and is the same plan as Mount Royal and Langevin.  The 3 storey design had a flat roof and balustrade across the top.  The two and a half storey design had fourteen classrooms designed for 600 students. It had a hipped roof with gable pediments, evenly spaced rectangular windows, a heavy arch over the entrance and a cupola over the ventilation shaft. Two of the designs permitted 15 rooms. Another design had 19 classrooms and was built in 1912.

Colonel Walker school, built in 1912 was 3 storey but had  a partial fourth floor. Many of the sandstone schools were then being reinforced with concrete and brick.  Parkhill School, at 2nd street SW and 36th avenue was built in 1912. It is a two storey sandstone with brick. It had four rooms. In 1989 this school was converted to four two-storey condos each with 13 foot ceilings.

King Edward School was built in 1912 with 19 classrooms and 3 storeys.  It had two cupolas. The auditorium this time was put on the ground floor. The sandstone for King Edward came from the 17th avenue quarry and the building cost $172,000 to build. After the war it accepted high school students and was sometimes called South Calgary High.  In 2012 it just sold to an arts foundation.

King George School, built in 1912, had a water tower built behind the school in 1932. Kids were told to keep away from the water tower but some did not and a Tower Gang reputedly challenged kids to climb to the top of the tower and do a headstand there. In 1939 after a blizzard, students at King George were unable to get home easily. Parents had to come for them and guide them across the field using rope. Those not able to get home were boarded at nearby houses for the night.  King George school had a roof made of slate and its own dining room, laundry and armoury.

Ramsey school was built in 1912 too and Stanley Jones came in 1913. Sandstone for Stanley Jones school came from the quarry in Shaganappi and was hauled by horse and wagon. This school got a silver cupola and a flagpole.  In the 1960s the school was renovated with a new gym and two more classrooms but it retains its original wood, high windows, high ceilings and large classrooms.

During an economic slump in 1913, the city found it needed more schools but could not afford fancy ones. More bungalow schools were set up. These four roomed structures appeared in Mount Pleasant and in Riverside. More transitional space was needed than that even and the city had to rent 3 church halls in Hillhurst  till a new school was built there. In 1915 the school board paid $30 a month to rent rooms in a church in Belfast for grade 1-3 students.  As the population swelled, at one point in 1930, 60% of the students enrolled in high school, grade 9 and up, were actually at elementary schools at five different buildings waiting for a high school to be built.

Sunalta School was built in 1913 replacing a cottage school from 1909. The new building of sandstone overlooks downtown and the Bow River valley. I have been at this school on a winter morning as the sun rose and found the view from the staff room window nothing short of magnificent. The school got a 1957 cinder block addition and artist Dean Stanton painted a mural on the west all of this addition, visible from the Crowchild Trail freeway. The school has official heritage site status.

Bridgeland school was a three storey built in 1913 and Balmoral was opened in 1915. Balmoral is at 16th avenue and 1st Street NW. It was built with five bays, the central one sticking out from the rest of the building. It has Ionic pilasters and carved lions’ heads on its exterior with rusticated bands on the lower level and articulated mouldings on upper levels. Its clock tower could be seen for miles. The build was made not just of thick sandstone but of brick masonry walls, with reinforced concrete floors and a slate roof. It cost nearly$200,000 to build and about $40,000 for the land.

Meanwhile rural schools were still often rudimentary. One was an old grain storage building.  Still in the country rough hewn logs were often used to make a school..

After the war, the need for schools continued but sandstone was very costly. In 1925 a two storey brick school was built at Elbow Park.  It featured wood panelled library with high arched ceiling. That library always strikes me with awe, reminds me of the poem about feeling small as you stand next to the ocean. The vaulted support beams are very much like a church.  The floors of polished hardwood, the leather chairs, the solid wooden library tables and chairs have been maintained and replicated through donations from the community.  This school and particularly this library speak to me of the great respect someone had for learning and for books.

In 1928 Crescent Heights High was built at a cost of $275,000. It was made of brick from Medicine Hat. The student body came over from their original location at  Balmoral School. The first principal at what is now Balmoral school had been William Aberhart, later premier of the province.  Crescent Heights high school is now itself a grand old school, walls lined with photos of students from past decades.  The school still has odd little stairwells and anterooms but got extensive renovations in 1985 converting the basement lunchroom to a theatre, the gym to a student centre and adding a new gym.

In 1930 Queen Elizabeth High school was built in Hillhurst. It is a 3 storey of brick, built on the site of a 1910 school named Bowview that had been a boarding school. Queen Elizabeth school also got renovations in 1953 and 1967, adding a wood shop, band rooms, a second gym library and science labs. More recently it has been linked by name with the elementary school beside it, also called Queen Elizabeth elementary and is one large complex, joined by a parking lot.

Some of the old schools have been closed, some of their replacements even having been replaced, but a few remain, with their additions, their updates and their memories. A hundred year old building, on a dark winter morning, is magical and a bit eerie if you are alone. The building itself has noises, the branches of trees rubbing against the windows, the old pipes creaking, wind whistling from the old furnace and through the vents. Old schools breed stories of ghosts, none of course substantiated but the stuff of folklore. Stories of earlier caretakers still maintaining the building create an endearing thread of time.  Noises of air in a fireplace, of floors creaking in the cold, or wind drafts from the heating system may be the logical explanations for people thinking they heard voices, moaning, felt things going past their face, heard steps on the stairs.

Other changes came.  By the 1ate 1940s many schools were able to get fluorescent lighting. Tile replaced wood floors There have been many schools built since the early ones. The city continues to expand so fast it’s like the saying major arteries are showing beneath its outskirts. Calgary has annexed much land and is now one of the largest cities in North American by physical size.  Its area is over 381 square miles (825 sq. km). It has about the area of Austin Texas, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Lisbon, Hamburg or Rome, but not the population density. The school district continues to have trouble keeping up with expansion as newcomers arrive. In 2012 we have a population well over a million, when in only 1981 it was just half that and in 1961 just a quarter of that.

It has half as many people per square kilometer as Los Angeles, and a quarter as many as Tokyo.  This means it is not crowded but people have a long way to go to school still. School bussing is a big cost.

It has been said that Calgary’s most common bird is the construction crane and yet even that is not always as true.  It is a boom and bust city even now and schools do not stop morphing.  The province is asked to help fund new schools but there is also the tight budget answer. 

In 1956 there was even a temporary school in a quonset structure, like one big arched metal cylinder but with two classrooms and outhouses. 

In 1961 Calgary did annex Forest Lawn, Springbank and Midnapore, areas which were quite far from the original town in the 1880s. In 1962 it added Montgomery.  Inner city schools began to face the dilemma of young families moving out to the suburbs, and the older inner city schools for a time lost enrolment. More recently high density apartment housing has reversed some of that trend.

New designs continue. One school built in 1969 had a strikingly unique design, by a Calgary architect. Mayland Heights, set within the rise of a hill, was built down into the earth to save fuel costs. It has skylights and a sunken gym but its main feature is a design pinwheeled around the main library.  The exterior is concrete and from the exterior it even has an appearance of an army bunker.  Architects from around the world have come to see it but few have imitated.

It’s fun to teach at the wide range of schools.  Some portables have even been linked now to the main buildings by heated walkways so kids don’t have to put their coats on each time they change class. Some portables still though are self-contained with their own furnace even, and  no washrooms. Kids have to leave the room and go in and out the metal stairwell to the main school for gym, music, library, for assemblies and even to use the washroom there.  The portables sometimes have a doorbell or you listen for knocking and in that I suspect they are  not much different from the one room school of long ago.

The early schools are not all gone.  Some have been made into museums. The early 1881 school in  Edmonton was preserved and renovators found that it had 23 layers of wallpaper over the years.

 
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