Talking education with Janet White

Photo: Wanda Chow/NewsLeader

Janet White is part of a group writing a book about the history of schools in Burnaby. Here's a story in the local paper about the book.

I contacted Janet White to ask her some more questions.

Why this book now?

People who were in on the early history of Burnaby are gone, and those from the 1920's are well into their 80's, sons and daughters of our pioneers, and their memories are not so good. Next, many current principals did not grow up here and do not have a feeling for saving our history, chucking old "stuff" out.

So, most of all we all are proud of our Burnaby schools, and our experience in them. We value the emotional stories as well as the historical influences which made the schools the way they were. Some have disappeared, some have been renamed, some have moved, and some have been rebuilt, for a total of 69 schools.

What inspired the book?

I had a librarian friend in Prince George, who, when she retired, got together with three other teachers and went around to each school in the Prince George School District and collected the history of each school and any memorabilia the school did not wish to keep.

They put it all in an old school and have groups of students come through, much like our Seaforth School in Burnaby Village Museum. A spiral bound book was later produced. After I retired, I wanted to do the same for Burnaby, and was told it had already been done by retired teachers in the 1980s, ending in 1989. I interviewed two people, still alive, from that committee and found their book had never been published, as they were not able to obtain funding. It was another year before I accidentally found a copy, in a filing cabinet at Schou Education Centre. I advertised for people to update this mimeographed copy, with its corrections, add an old picture and a new picture, spiral bind it and get it out. By this time, I had seen Langley Retired Teachers' School Histories Book, and based our idea on theirs. This was 2005. We, too, set out to get funding, while we were doing the research. We finally found our mentor and sponsor in Jim Wolf, City Planner for Burnaby City Hall.

Through the Burnaby Heritage Commission, he was able to obtain good funding. We were later surprised with a small grant from the BC Retired Teachers' Association. Our small committee of five or six were on our way... until we realized WOLF's vision of the book was different from ours. He wanted to use just a few schools from each era in the book. We wanted the History of every school. Things stalled, although we plugged slowly along. Finally in late 2010, we revived our committee with a different commission representative, Harry Pride, and he brought on board, his friend, Dave Carter, who has proved a valuable asset — both were retired Burnaby administrators. Rosemary Cook, a retired elementary teacher and Gail Yip, a community member, and historian, who grew up in Burnaby stayed on from our 2005 Committee. We all loved history, and we all believed in the book.

We soon realized that the story of the schools were incomplete without stories about the main reason the schools were built, the students and the people who worked with, and for them. Then the fun began ... collecting all these stories. And the pictures to go with these stories had to be worth 1000 words, not just cold pictures of buildings.

So, here we are, in 2013, with 168 articles written and edited, which include stories of the blind, the deaf, the crossing guards, the custodians, the ESL learners, the sports, the fine arts, the famous and not so famous.

What was the one thing you were really surprised at, doing this research? 

Committee members were surprised at the change in tone in the schools, the change in methods, getting and recording information— Internet, computers, the line of decision making, i.e. funding decided by teams not just the principal; specialization of schools. A surprise for some, including me, was the building of a Russian submarine at Barnet Beach (WWI), rifle ranges in school basements in Burnaby North and South schools; air raid sirens on the schools, air raid mask practices — which scared some students — and a bunker kitty-corner to Moscrop Secondary.