By the time they hit age 10, many students are over school.
They’re over waking up early, the last-minute cramming and pretending to be concerned by the finer points of hurling Nerf balls.
When I covered the closure of Parkdale School for The Reminder, I interviewed a number of students who were 10 or older.
And guess what? Not one of them was excited to see the curtain draw on their school.
“I’m pretty mad that Parkdale’s closing down ’cause I wanted to go all the way to Grade 8 and then Hapnot,” Josh Wilson told me at the time.
“It’s a really good school and the teachers are great, and you just have a lot of fun when you’re here,” added Danielle McIntyre.
Gone a decade
It must be hard for those kids (now adults) to believe – as it is for me – that Parkdale School has now been gone a decade.
Well, just about. It was back on June 24, 2005 that Parkdale held its final day of classes. That was just two days after a farewell celebration.
The lead-up to that emotional week was full of more twists and turns than a break dancing competition. (Sorry… I grew up in the ’80s, partially).
As the calendar turned on 2005, Flin Flon school trustees were under pressure to reduce costs by closing a school.
With 200 students and a location several blocks away from the much larger École McIsaac School, Parkdale seemed the natural choice.
And so trustees recommended that Parkdale students be dispersed between McIsaac and Ruth Betts schools beginning in September 2006. Many Faces Education Centre would then move into the Parkdale building.
Not surprisingly, a volcano of controversy erupted. Parkdale parents and students fought for their school’s survival, with one precocious 10-year-old girl amassing hundreds of signatures on her “please reconsider” petition.
Fruitless
What nobody knew was just how fruitless the protests would be.
On May 18, 2005, before trustees had a chance to vote on the Parkdale closure, an engineer inspected the building to ensure everything was up to snuff. It wasn’t.
Six days later, on May 24, trustees voted unanimously to close the building for the 2005-06 school year. The reason? Serious structural concerns.
“We’re still in shock,” Superintendent of Schools Blaine Veitch told an equally surprised public following the vote.
At the time, there was still a chance that Parkdale would reopen as an elementary and junior high school in the fall of 2006, following the requisite repair work.
But pretty much everyone involved with the school knew the writing was on the wall. Parkdale, as they knew it, was finished.
Covering the ensuing farewell celebration was a trip down memory lane for this reporter. Parkdale, you see, was my alma mater, the school where I studied (and often pretended to study) from kindergarten to Grade 6.
Clearly I wasn’t the only one with fond memories of this familiar brown and yellow building. The celebration brought out some 300 past and then-present students, teachers and parents.
They listened to speeches and pored over weathered photographs. They exchanged hugs and shared recollections. Roaming the hallowed hallways one last time, they often laughed and smiled.
Sadness
Yet underneath it all seemed to be a genuine sense of sadness that after all these years, this great school was going to be empty.
“It’s more emotional than I expected,” Bill Pauley, then the principal, told me at the time. “I’ve only been here for four years, but I’ll tell you, it’s been unbelievable, a great four years.”
And a great 48 years. Parkdale School opened on Jan. 3, 1957 out of simple necessity.
As the Birchview and Mile 84 areas filled up with families, education officials of the day realized the need for a neighbourhood school.
Parkdale was born, the name reflecting the school’s proximity to a wide open park – Queen's Park – where students would often play. The term “dale” refers to an open area.
Nayda Maximchuk, Parkdale’s first Grade 1 teacher, knew right away she had arrived at a special place.
Unlike her previous school, she found this new facility to be very kid-friendly.
“The blackboards and the little cubby holes were all low for the children,” Maximchuk told me back in 2005.
Parkdale had seen its share of ups and downs over the years. There were the exciting times, like when a gymnasium and two classrooms were added in 1981.
In 2001, a colourful new jungle gym was installed thanks to an exhaustive fundraising effort by parents.
But with all the good came some bad.
Parkdale was the subject of frequent closure rumours, often leaving parents and students uneasy. More regrettably, the school mourned the loss of principal Brian King, who perished in a 1993 vehicle accident.
Enrollment fluctuated from as high as the 270 range to as low as the 160s. Dozens of teachers came and went. Three grades – kindergarten and grades 7 and 8 – were added.
And computers, a learning tool still decades away when the school opened, became commonplace.
Well-kept secret
Through it all, the school always seemed to remain a well-kept secret. Despite its popularity among students, staff and parents, Parkdale never received the same degree of attention as its larger counterparts.
Yet in the view of so many, Parkdale’s limited student body was precisely what distinguished it.
“You know every kid. I think I could say I know 90 per cent of the kids’ names here,” Pauley said at the time.
One of Pauley's predecessors, Harry Antoniw, remembered how his staff were always appreciative of Parkdale’s cozy atmosphere.
“They really did not want to move once they came to Parkdale School,” Antoniw,
who spent 21
years as principal, said back in 2005. “It was a smaller school, so you get to know each other very well.”
As promised, Parkdale sat empty for 2005-06. In 2006, crews demolished the school’s original wing, the source of the structural concerns.
In the fall of 2007, Many Faces moved into the residual portion, just as had been proposed two years earlier. Many Faces has been there ever since.
Between the Many Faces grad class photos and the impressive school mural in the gym, there are few, if any, reminders of the building’s Parkdale roots.
But for people like Tim Babcock, it will always be Parkdale School.
A Flin Flon native and two-term city councillor, Babcock attended Parkdale in the 1980s and ’90s, up until Grade 6.
“I spent some of the most important years of my life there,” Babcock says. “It’s where I met a lot of the people that are still an important part of my life.”
Parkdale alumni everywhere are nodding their heads.
Stuff of Memories
This Local Angle opinion column, written by Jonathon Naylor, was published in The Reminder on Oct. 13, 2006:
I suppose everyone recalls their elementary school with a smile. It’s where we chased girls at recess (or sometimes vice versa), met our first friends, and learned many early lessons life has to offer.
But something beyond all of that made Parkdale School distinctive. As Parkdale’s original wing is demolished, the victim of structural concerns, I’ve been thinking a lot about the friendly brown and yellow building.
Parkdale is my alma mater, the first school I attended. I still remember walking into that kindergarten room full of strangers all those years. It was a time of fear, excitement and uncertainty all rolled into one.
Part of what made Parkdale exceptional was its size. It was always a small school, the proverbial runt of the litter. By 2001, it had just 168 students (though that number did grow in the ensuing years).
Some in the public saw Parkdale’s diminutiveness as a negative. Fewer students means fewer staff, and fewer staff means fewer services. How could Parkdale compete with larger schools?
There may have been some rhyme or reason to those concerns, but any downside was more than balanced out by the close-knit nature permeating Parkdale’s hallowed halls.
Parkdale was a neighbourly place. You got to know everybody in your grade, and many of those in other grades. At recess, what grade you were in didn’t often matter as kids scrambled to fill roster spots on makeshift sports teams.
Location also made Parkdale unique. Every spring, we would dig out our markers and rulers to craft miniature boats that we raced down the stream not far from the jungle gym.
We would build small forts in the bush surrounding the school grounds. On our more adventurous days, we would trek out to nearby “Deadman’s Rock” (also known as “White Rock”). We had to be watchful, though, as this area was technically out of bounds.
On our more mischievous days, our proximity to Hapnot was a source of fun as we’d goad the high schoolers into chasing us during noon-hour and after the final buzzer.
I have so many other memories. We’d pull our shirtsleeves over our hands and slide down the smooth wooden rail in the east staircase. We’d spin until we were dizzy on the creaky old merry-go-round by the rocks.
Looking back, the teachers were pretty good, too, even if we weren’t yet mature enough to realize it.
When my sixth grade class graduated beyond Parkdale and headed to McIsaac, many of us were saddened. We truly didn’t want to leave this great place. We knew things would never be the same.
In recent years, a cloud of uncertainty hung over Parkdale. Closure rumours were common as our population dwindled. Students, I’m sure, were on edge.
The final word on Parkdale came last year when structural concerns forced the school board to close the building.
The original wing will reopen in 2007 as the new home of Many Faces, University College of the North and Campus Manitoba. Now a new group of students will create their own memories in what was once Parkdale School.
