Return to Alphabetical List  How were dates and names determined?
The names and dates of British Columbia's rural and assisted schools were determined by consulting notices published in the official government Gazette and by cross-checking with administrative records created by the Department of Education.

Notices published in the government Gazette indicate when a school district was officially created or defined by the Council of Public Instruction (i.e. by Cabinet). The notices indicate the official name of the school district, and the location and geographic boundaries of the district.

The government Gazette is also the main source for information relating to changes in school district boundaries. As well, the Gazette recorded changes to the names of school districts and any changes in the classification of school districts. [For details on how British Columbia school districts were classified, click here.]

In these pages of The Homeroom, the following method of notation has been used to record the names and dates of rural and assisted schools.

The original name of each school district is given, along with the year that school district was first defined. A name and a date in parentheses indicates that the original name of the school was subsequently altered. An effort has also been made to identify schools which were first established under other names.

For example:

The first entry indicates that Granite Siding School District was established in 1907 and that its name was changed to Belford in 1919. The second entry shows that Belford School District, gazetted in 1919, had originally been defined under the name Granite Siding in 1907.

In some instances, a school district was renamed within months of its establishment. In such cases, the same conventions apply in our list of rural and assisted schools:

In this example, the school first appears in the Gazette under the name Stillwater in 1925, but later that year its name was changed to Annie Bay.

To confuse matters further, sometimes the same name was given to different schools in different parts of the province! For example, Alexandria school district, near Nanaimo, was officially established in 1898. The school was renamed South Wellington in 1911 and the following year (1912) another school called Alexandria opened on the Mainland.

A final caveat. It was not uncommon for a school to be in operation for many years before its boundaries were officially defined by the Council of Public Instruction and before an official notice was placed in the government Gazette. In Clinton, for example, a school was opened as early as 1869, although the school district was not formally defined until 1892. Similarly, a whole raft of rural and assisted schools, defined by the Council of Public Instruction for the first time in 1929/30, had in fact been opened several years earlier.

That being said, this list of rural and assisted schools is about as definitive as it gets. It was compiled in 1990 with the assistance of Karen Flello, formerly a student in the Faculty of Education at the University of Victoria, and Catherine Henderson, an archivist in the Historical Records section (as it was then known) of the British Columbia Archives. Derek DeGear, a graduate of the Education programme at Malaspina University-College, prepared the HTML version of the list. Diane Shortt, who is enrolled in Malaspina's concurrent B. A./B. Ed. degree programme, created the graphics, developed the links, and designed the pages in this section of The Homeroom.

Sources:
Patrick A. Dunae, The School Record (1992), Appendix C, pp. 103-140. The appendix was compiled using records held by the British Columbia Archives - notably GR 138 (British Columbia. Council of Public Instruction. Minutes & Orders of the Council [vols. 1-3, 1891-1971]; and GR 1479 (British Columbia. Department of Education. Records pertaining to school properties, school sites and school district boundaries, 1886-1948].

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