‘There is heritage here. There is history’
Sad farewells for former students at schools that will be closed
The teachers were great. It is the teachers that make the school, but we wanted to take a last look at the building before they tear it down.” Rebecca Smit
They called it a farewell open house. Parents, staff and students both current and former, gathered in the hallways and classrooms of Alexandra School Thursday to say goodbye.
The Henry St. school closes in June. The District School Board of Niagara will demolish the building and turn it into a parking lot for the $11-million Harriet Tubman School, which is rising in an adjacent field.
“A building like this is part of your life,” said Mike Thompson, who went Alexandra from 1954 to 1960.
He was looking at a display set up in one of the classrooms featuring pictures from the 1950s.
“It was like a big family here back then,” he said, as he noticed his sister in one of the old photos.
Alexandra and three other downtown schools — Memorial, Queen Mary and Maywood — will fold into Harriet Tubman school in the fall.
They all held their own bittersweet open houses Thursday.
Board trustees voted in 2013 to combine the schools into a new facility, following a heated accommodation review of central St. Catharines elementary schools.
“It is a little sad, but it is nice that they are getting a new building,” said former Alexandra student Lauren Smit, 13. “I went here for two years and I loved it. The teachers were really nice.”
Her mother, Rebecca Smit, checked out the classrooms throughout the school with her daughter.
“This was a good place,” she said. “The teachers were great. It is the teachers that make the school, but we wanted to take a last look at the building before they tear it down.”
Built early in the century, Alexandra replaced two small, outdated wooden-frame schools with an eight-room, two-storey building, the board’s website said. It survived a fire in 1958 and was expanded and renovated multiple times over the years.
“I can see why it isn’t feasible to keep it operating,” said Thompson, a retired police officer. “They would have to do major renovations to make it the kind of school you need these days.
“What gets me is the way they are casting off the name. This is going to be a parking lot. I don’t see why they can’t do something like use the old bricks to keep the outline of the old original school or something. There is heritage here. There is history here.”