I lived in Fond du Lac and was employed at Father Gamache Memorial School during the 2004-2005 school year. The following is a description of my recollections of the school at that time.
Some people who have walked through the halls of Father Gamache Memorial School will remember for years afterwards the bright colours and interesting design of the building. Other people will be left with the impression that the building was an institution that very much resembled a prison with its high gated fences and turrets on the roof.
I once saw a teacher climb over the fence after dismissing his class a minute too early at the end of a school day. The teacher was too impatient to wait in line with his students for a security guard to arrive and unlock the padlocked gate.
High fences not only surrounded the school yard but they also divided it into segmented sections. Every two or three grades had their own gated section of the school yard to play in.
Father Gamache Memorial School was a modern building with facilities comparable to many schools that are located hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of kilometres farther south on the North American continent.
Outside there was some playground climbing equipment with a slide for the youngest students. There was a sliding hill for sleighs and toboggans just outside a school hall doorway. The school yard contained two paved basketball courts that could also be used for floor hockey. There was a baseball diamond, a football field and two gravel parking lots.
The parking lots were mainly used by three school buses and two school owned pickup trucks. As Fond du Lac was a fly-in community very few teachers or parents had a personal vehicle within the community while I was teaching there.
The toboggan hill and climbing equipment were used extensively by the students in the youngest grades of the school. The older students found that a thick layer of snow caused the outdoor sports facilities to be pretty much useless to them throughout most of the school year.
The cold arctic climate, a very short growing season, a gravel soil, and the heavy traffic of human footprints resulted in there being very few plants of grass and weeds growing in the school yard.
Inside Father Gamache Memorial School there was a gymnasium, library, computer lab, science room, cosmetology room, industrial arts room, kindergarten room, staff room, and school office. The original classrooms in the high school wing of the building - including many of the rooms I have just listed - were unusually small for a Canadian school. It was a tight fit trying to squeeze large high school students and their desks into classrooms that had been designed for only half as many students.
There was a storage room for all the school paper and supplies that had to be brought in annually by trucks over the winter road in late February. The transportation costs were just too expensive to try bring in a few hundred boxes of paper and other school supplies on small airplanes at other times of the year. Despite the storage room there were many boxes of school supplies piled up in many locations throughout the school when I first arrived in August. The overflow from the storage room made it very inconvenient or impossible to use other areas of the school for their intended purpose, such as the gymnasium stage.
The student population of Father Gamache Memorial School had been growing very rapidly. Although the school was still new the government had already built a number of extensions onto the building. With the school being on the side of a hill near the base of an escarpment the design and construction of each new hallway of classrooms had been a challenge for the architects and engineers. The new extensions created an interesting layout of hallways and classrooms within the building.
The bold and bright colour scheme in the classrooms and throughout the building with orange being one of the dominant colours enhanced the uniqueness of the school.
The location of the school on the side of an escarpment caused drainage problems with water flowing down the hill into the building. A construction crew was busy digging trenches and installing large diameter pipes part way up the hill to try to divert the flow of water during the fall of 2004. It was a major capital expense for the government to add to the overall cost of the school.
There were three old school portables attached together beside the Education Office building. The Education Office building was across the parking lot from the school. The portables appeared to have been very extensively used in the past and were in need of major renovations or replacement but we used two of them anyways for part of the school year.
Trying to timetable the students and teachers into classrooms and speciality rooms was a frustrating undertaking. A single gymnasium, library and undersized computer lab were insufficient to meet the students' needs or the weekly number of hours required by the provincially imposed curriculum. There was just too many classes of students to timetable them all into the speciality rooms at anything close to the correct frequencies per student, even when we tried combining some classes. We got through the school year but there definitely was a need not just for another building extension but for a second school to be built in Fond du Lac. There was also a need for an adult education centre to be built to meet the diverse education needs (academic upgrading, vocational programs, post secondary courses) of the rapidly increasing population of young adults in the community.
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