There’s a brief history of the first 60 years of schooling in the Fraser Fort George region documented in a book and a digital version that was created by Tiiu Noukas, co-chair of the Education Heritage Committee of the Prince George Retired Teachers’ Association.
“I thought it was important to collect the available data and assemble it so that circumstances of the times would show the development of public education,” Noukas said. “It was important to provide an overview of regional educational history and it also serves as a starting point for researchers to delve further. So I just thought I’d do just a really short book and then they can branch out from there.”
Noukas first wrote the brief histories included in Local Schooling for the retired teachers’ newsletters from 2015-2020 and from there adapted them for the book.
Noukas spent 12 years researching early newspapers that had accounts of teachers, students and school activities from 1909 to 1969. She also looked at biographies, local history and essays which offered details into school-related experiences.
To start to collect all the information the Retired Teachers’ Association would access the library’s micro fiche, photocopy the documents and type them up from there. There was a whole team who dedicated their time to recount the histories of the schools in the region, Noukas said.
“I became the head of the project after a while and I loved it,” Noukas said. “It ended up being three huge volumes of the Citizen and the other early papers all typed up. I had read it all and I could easily put it into the newsletters for our association and I thought I could be useful for researchers to access this as well.”
Local Schooling is available through the Northern BC Archives & Special Collections at UNBC.
