![]() It wasn’t going to break open a scandal, or expose wrongdoing. It involved phoning lots and lots of schools and asking, “Can you tell me who X is?” This wasn’t an earth-shattering investigation. This story was labour-intensive and took a while to write. That’s her portrait at the top of the page. Elizabeth Sutherland is one of the few exceptions. One of the things I learned is that almost none of the schools in the province are named after women. Gillis suffered a severe stroke at age 45, and lived for another 27 years before passing away in 2007.” Someone I know who attended the school in the 2010s told me everyone just called it “Regional” and he’d never really thought about who it was named after. It says that Gillis, the supervisor of town schools for Antigonish (he had a PhD in education) “was an ever-present advocate for education and believed one had to do everything in their power to help a student. John Hugh Gillis Regional High School in Antigonish shows a man with a slightly rakish smile and a carnation in his lapel. They include a beloved caretaker, a teen hockey player fatally injured on the ice, and a blacksmith turned city councillor…Ī plaque at Dr. ![]() Instead, you’re much more likely to find the names of local doctors and priests, school administrators, local or provincial politicians, war heroes, and an array of local landowners, trailblazers, artisans, and people who became community fixtures. In Nova Scotia, I was surprised to learn, vanishingly few schools are named after major contemporary or historical figures… The story I wrote was called “What’s in a (school) name?” and it was published a year ago today. And, it turned out, neither did some of the staff at those schools. The thing is, looking at the list of names of people, I had no idea who many of them were. Well, I did find the spreadsheet, which was organized by centre for education, but then I broke it down into categories: schools named for geographic features, streets, famous people, not-so-famous people, and so on. Find a spreadsheet somewhere, and look at the names. I figured this would be a pretty straightforward affair. Last year, when a few schools in the Halifax Regional Centre for Education changed their names, I got to wondering about who Nova Scotia’s schools were named after. Before moving on to the rest of today’s Morning File, I want to share a story-behind-the-story anecdote with you.Īs a freelance contributor, one of the things I appreciate about the Examiner is editor/publisher Tim Bousquet’s openness to letting me run with quirky story ideas, and to pay me well enough to make them worth pursuing. Yes, it’s time for the Examiner’s annual subscription drive. Elizabeth Sutherland, who taught at the first public school in Spryfield, opened in the 1850s.
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