Sturgeon School Division students have written a new book to celebrate their district's 75th anniversary.
The students got their first look this week at the full-colour book they helped create to celebrate the milestone.
It's a children's book written by children for children, says Ruth Kuik, who co-ordinated the project for the school district.
"We wanted our students from our schools to tell the history of the Sturgeon School Division from their perspective," she said.
Although the division did a formal history book for its 50th anniversary, Kuik says those sorts of books tend to be written by (and for) historians rather than students.
This new book is full of bright colours and illustrations and isn't dense with information, she continues. "It is really for children to read."
The board came up with the idea for the project as part of its ongoing push to get students involved in everything it does, said board chair Terry Jewell. They then asked teachers in the division's 16 schools to create a submission that expresses what school means to them.
"Sixteen insertions later, and we had a book."
The board left it up to each school to figure out how they wanted to represent themselves in the book, Kuik said.
Landing Trail School students wrote about Lucky the Horse's day at the school, for example, while Oak Hill students extolled the virtues of their school's horses and donkeys.
"Oak Hill School is like a rock concert because it is loud and fun," the students wrote.
Others illustrated their schools with pencil crayons, photos or paintings.
Jocelyn Fraser Communications assembled the book and did the graphics, Kuik said.
The whole project cost about $20,000 and produced some 150 books, Kuik said. Trustees will visit district schools this week to read passages from the book and to distribute the books to local libraries. Two extra-big versions of the book will remain at district office.
Jewell said the board did not plan to sell the book or print extra copies, but might consider doing so if there was enough demand.
Inkwells, cold and bounties
The Sturgeon School Division came to be on Jan. 3, 1939, after the province decided to amalgamate many of its small four-by-four districts, Jewell said. The district originally included St. Albert, which split off in 1957.
Most schools would have been one-room affairs in those days, reports the district's official history book. Schools had little in the way of equipment or books – libraries were often little more than a shelf or two.
"A field trip in those days would be to go into one of the libraries in Edmonton," recalls Jewell, who started school at Poplar Lake in the 1950s. He recalls being amazed at all the books he saw in those libraries.
Cars were rare in those days, Jewell continues, and many students rode horses to school. Teachers often lived on the school grounds and were responsible for getting the furnace lit on time.
Typical school days started with the Lord's Prayer and involved bible readings, spelling matches and drills, the official history says. Students could make extra cash by turning in crow feet and gopher tails to the teachers for five or two-cent bounties (respectively).
While the district is roughly the same geographic size today as it was back then, it's grown considerably in terms of population, Jewell said.
"The way of teaching is changing," he said, when asked how the district would look in another 25 years. Computer technology would give students much more flexibility when it came to how and where they learned.
"I think we'll chug along and deliver excellent education to a bunch of great kids."
