Connecting the Continents by Ted Rowe

Author:Ted Rowe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS000000, HIS006000
Publisher: Creative Book Publishing
Published: 2009-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

Lakeview School 1896.

In 1881, more than 20 children of Anglo families were attending class under Adams, and the shareholders of the private school were sitting with no teacher and an empty building on their hands. When Ezra Weedon, his health in decline, resigned as president of the School Association, the shareholders moved to regroup. A few days after Weedon’s resignation in April 1882, they elected a management committee, headed by Charles Trippe, to put the school back in operation.9 The committee wanted to hire a schoolmaster from England, but this was an expense the shareholders were unwilling to assume. Instead, they brought in another young mistress from Nova Scotia, a Miss Woodworth, at a salary of $400. The school reopened on May 1. Anglo children trotted back from the CCCS School and new pupils came in, bringing the enrolment to 38.

The committee took charge of running the school, which they named Lakeview. They drew up a set of operating procedures, dividing the children into first, second and third classes according to their age and the subjects taken, and established a new scale of fees. The holiday schedule was set at four weeks in the summer, a fortnight at Christmas, plus Good Friday and Easter Monday. There was a public examination at Christmas. The committee visited the school every three months, and they asked William Pilot, the inspector of Church of England schools, to carry out an annual inspection.

They also provided an assistant for the teacher, and the next three years went well, the shareholders receiving a small dividend on their investment. Then Miss Woodworth asked for a salary increase in return for extra teaching. The committee waffled, at first refusing but then agreeing on condition that they terminate her assistant. Frustrated, and perhaps still stinging from the affair with the water-works engineer, Miss Woodworth was in no mood to bargain. She resigned, packed her bags and left.

There followed a period of turmoil and unrest at the school, firmly demonstrating the folly of management by committee. Four new teachers came and went in four years. What the shareholders wanted was an English schoolmaster. They considered it beyond their means to get one, but they seemed unable to satisfy themselves with anything less. Without Weedon’s leadership, they were floundering. They meddled in matters that were better left to the teacher and bickered among themselves. If a family took a dislike to the teacher, they took their children out of school and refused to pay their fees.

In this environment the management committee had its hands full, trying to shoulder disciplinary as well as administrative problems. Many of the students were now in their teens and exhibiting more than a passing interest in the other sex:

… to keep the boys and girls separate outside the schoolroom it was agreed to put up a board fence setting apart a portion of the ground for exclusive use of girls and that WCs at back of school should be used by the girls only – a new one to be erected for the boys.

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