If it wasn’t for a disgruntled railroad employee, who knows when Jasper’s children would have started school.
In 1914, Webb B. Well, who operated the Canadian National Railway Company’s restaurant in town, was so fed up with kids that “ran like wild deer” through the town that he insisted someone plunk them in school.
So, on Jan. 3, 1914, an old tar-paper box car—left by a railroad construction crew—was donated, and became Jasper’s first school house. Lillian Taylor was the town’s first teacher, and was paid a salary of $70 a month to shape the minds of the town’s youth. That lasted only a single year.
Col. Sam Rogers, the superintendent of Jasper National Park at the time, found the building so ugly he ordered it torn down, and the next year sent the kids to school in a canvas tent. That year the blackboard stood atop two old chairs on the uneven dirt floors. On windy days the gusts whooshed under the canvas and knocked over the teacher’s desk.
Mel Taylor took over teaching that year, and the students called him “the red squirrel” because of his blustery complexion.
Over the next decade, classes were held everywhere from the Catholic Church to the Legion hall, as the number of students grew. Finally, when a swell of new arrivals from Lucerne bumped up the town’s population in 1924, a brand new school was built.
A few years later a second floor was added, and in 1941 a gym and library. Many remember the building as being a beautiful piece of architecture, and Karen Byers, the manager of the Jasper-Yellowhead Museum and Archives, laments the fact that it was torn down when the new elementary school was built in the 60s.
More than a decade earlier, in 1952, a new high school had been built, after it was decided that the high school and elementary students should attend separate schools.
And while the loss of the building is a shame, many of the memories it created still have legs. According to Byers, the building originally had four classrooms, and Grade 1 students took classes in the basement. When fire drills sounded, they would have to climb out the windows to get free of the building.
In a testimony published in the local newspaper in 1930, Dora Doyle remembered the school’s janitor, Jack Wilson, who kept “exotic red geraniums” in every window, and “drifted from one room to the other like a carrier pigeon with his bits of news and gossip.”
Arvin Hillworth, who went to school in the building, has his own memories of the school’s janitor—because for a week it was him. In the late 40s the school’s full-time janitor fell ill, and the school needed someone to take care of the coal furnace.
Hillworth had experience cleaning coaches, so he was asked to take over the duties. He would stay all evening cleaning, go home for a quick dinner before returning to take care of the furnace all night. He remembers teachers showing up early in the morning to give him a chance to go home for breakfast before the school day started.
“It was quite an experience to stay overnight in the [darn] place,” he said with a chuckle.
Dale Karpluk was a teacher and principal in the Jasper school system for more than 40 years. She started her career after the new schools had been built. Of course, she pointed out in an interview March 14, what was modern in the 1960s is a far cry from today’s technology.
Her first year teaching was in 1964, and she remembers students working on typewriters, and making copies of assignments on old “ditto machines” she had to crank by hand. Female teachers weren’t allowed to wear pants, and nuns sporting full habits taught classes.
Smiling at the memory, Karpluk told the story of the advice one of the sisters gave her when the school superintendent came for an inspection.
“He wants to see active participation, Dale. So I always tell my class that if you know the answer put up your right hand, and if you don’t put up your left,” she said.
Karpluk’s fondest memories, however, are of the Christmas concerts the school put on every year. She remembers one year an elementary class was just about to start their song, when “the curtain opened and there was two little boys in the front row punching each other.”
She remembers the curtain whooshing shut, and seeing in the gap between the curtain and the floor a pair of heels clack across the stage, shuffle around, and clack back to the wings. The curtain opened and the two boys were smiling sweetly.
“She must have threatened them within an inch of their lives,” Karpluk laughed.
As Karpluk and others were forming memories of the school system, Jasper’s French population was pushing for better French-language education. For a long time, laws in Alberta limited the amount of French teachers who were allowed to teach, but not long after those laws were finally changed, École Desrochers opened its doors.
Starting in 2001 the Francophone school taught Kindergarten to Grade 6, and operated out of classrooms 19 and 20 in the high school.
As the institution grew, it moved to the space it currently occupies in the Legion, and in the mid 2000s, Principal Marie-Claude Faucher created the secondary school program “almost in a weekend,” according to the school’s current principal Hélène Gendron.
Some high school students had expressed interest in taking French-language education, so Faucher sent them to live with French families over the summer, giving them a crash course in the French language so they could start school in the fall.
Since then the school has been slowly and steadily growing, and next year it will move into the town’s new joint school facility, along with the Jasper Junior/Senior High School. The move will be historic for both institutions, and will mark the beginning of a new chapter in the history of the school system in Jasper.
Karpluk said she was always proud of the variety of options available to Jasper’s limited student body, and thinks the new building will expand those opportunities even further.
“We’ve been pretty lucky, I think, in Jasper,” she said.
 Trevor Nichols
[email protected]
