Quote:
Originally Posted by Keith P.
I was at St Pat's in the early '70s and graduated in '73. It was still Catholic at the time. It was good in one sense in that all of my Catholic-school junior high friends joined me there so I knew a lot of my classmates. With 2000 kids enrolled there at the time it would have been challenging to have most of them being strangers. The place was packed. There were still a few nuns teaching at the time.
I had an older brother who went there years earlier who said it was very strict back when he was there. Classes were segregated male vs female and he claimed even the halls were kept separate with lanes where males walked and had lockers on one side and females opposite. I didn't see any evidence of that when I was there so I don't know if it is true. It was certainly a different time.
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I was curious so I went to dig a bit deeper and found this directory:
https://www.ednet.ns.ca/directory-schools-historical
It lists Nova Scotia schools, enrollments, feeders schools etc. going back to the late 1950s(!) In 1972-73 St. Pat's had an enrollment of 1,905 students (Grades 10-12 only) and Queen Elizabeth HS had 1,629 enrollment. That'd be like Citadel HS having over 3,500+ students today, that's insane.
There were some other things I didn't know, one being a school called Sidney Stephen High in Bedford (predated C.P. Allen?) and another called Graham Creighton High (predated Cole Harbour/Auburn High?). I'm guessing around that time they built Sackville High and moved all the Bedford kids over to Lower Sackville which must have just been starting to develop into what it is today, then it got over crowed really fast so they built C.P. Allen and split the two (then added Millwoods later in the 1980s).
There were also Vocational High Schools which I had heard about but those were phased out by the time I started public school and NSCC was created. I do recall the old Bell Road school building, where Citadel HS is located now but I'm sure it was closed as a vocational/community college by that point and left vacant.
You'd be around my parent's age Keith, they would have graduated in the early/mid 70s. Even up in Antigonish they had a Catholic/Protestant-Secular system when they went to school, although I think they reformed that somewhat mostly by the early 1960s. They had split the districts from Catholic/Protestant to Town/County but still had Wednesday morning mass at the school gymnasiums as a compromise. My eldest brother started public school in the late 1980s and they still did 1st period Wednesday mass in the gyms and he had to go with 95% of his classmates; some teachers were still old nuns even then.
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