[ISL] On the one-room schoolhouse of Nova Scotia's Big Tancook Island

[rfmcdonald]

Nova Scotia's Big Tancook Island has gotten a fair amount of media coverage after the successful effort to save its one-room schoolhouse. The Toronto Star's Jim Coyle wrote about this in "One-room Nova Scotia schoolhouse gets top grades".

Probably no one was happier than Hillary Dionne to see the one-room schoolhouse on Big Tancook Island, N.S., escape closure. For her, that little school is a whole lot more than the sum of its enrolment.

“It’s a huge part of our community,” she told the Star this week. “If we lost the school, that potentially would stop the growth of the island, because no young families would consider moving here without a school.”

Big Tancook is an idyllic 225-hectare patch of terra firma 10 kilometres off Chester, N.S., in the mouth of Mahone Bay. Its population is just over 100. And for the coming school year, Big Tancook Island Elementary School, built about 1950 and among the last one-room schoolhouses in Canada, has all of two students registered for enrolment.

Island residents were on tenterhooks this month after a review by the South Shore Regional School Board and a vote on whether to close the school and have local kids ferry to the mainland for classes.

To the relief of Dionne and her neighbours, the school survived to teach again.