<Begin Segment 45>

TI: Well, go back to the educators. So what was the quality of schools like at New Denver?

HS: At New Denver, the quality of school was you had schoolteachers who were, some of them were at the university level. A lot of them were people who had finished high school, completed their high school, and so that they were, not full-fledged teachers, but they became teachers because they had the full education and they knew what had gone through the curriculum of the B.C. schooling. And so we used, we followed the regular B.C. schooling curriculum, four of each of the -- we didn't have the equipment, say, things for science. They didn't have science labs or things like that, but you didn't have that much in those days. Most of it was reading, writing, arithmetic. It was basic, basic education. You had to learn the basics of history, of English, of math, of literature. That was what you might say. Now, each summer from 1943 on, each summer, they would have a summer school held in New Denver, where all the teachers, all these, these what you might call now "ghost town teachers," because they were, it's like a lot of them were, like you say, not full-fledged teachers, they were just high school graduates. And some of them were early university type, they would all congregate in New Denver to attend, I think it was a five-week course or something like that, four or five week course of summer school.

TI: For the teachers?

HS: For the teachers, yes.

TI: And so they were being trained...

HS: They were getting more, getting more advanced training to be better teachers, and they would be then sent back to their places for their teaching for the next year. So they gradually upgraded themselves.

TI: So it sounds like the quality of teaching, of education, was pretty good.

HS: It was very good when you consider where they started. They started with kids that were only eighteen or nineteen, these, some of these kids were just, or even younger. They had just come out of high school. And they gradually developed themselves into full, they would have to become teachers in the full sense. But there were was from grade one to grade eight, this was carried out in each of the, at each of the camps. Now, New Denver went to grade eight. Now, what happened in '43, the question came up, what do you do for high schools, from grade nine to twelve? And at that time, they hadn't even, the B.C. Security Commission hadn't even thought of that. All they thought was of the elementary area from... I think there was a, you had to have by law or something, you had to spend, you had to be up to grade eight or grade nine, and so they had to do this, to, they had to educate people up to grade nine. But from there on, they washed their hands of it. They said, "Well, the rest of it's up to you," sort of idea. Well, up at grade nine level, they thought, well, they could do, they could develop a correspondence course. You know, you had these correspondence areas, extension departments.

TI: I'm sorry, you're talking about in high school?

HS: High school, yeah, after grade eight. So they were going to, idea was that we would have a correspondence course. And in 1943, some nuns and a Catholic priest arrived, and they say they came to the camp and talked to the people that were, the leaders in the camp, they said, "We would like to start a kindergarten." And they said, "Well, we don't need a kindergarten. We have plenty of people who are teaching, we're teaching kids now up to grade, grade one to eight, we have 'em, we have little play schools set up, that we can do all that sort of thing. What we do need is a high school." So this, these people went away, and they came back within a short time saying, "Okay, we'll build a high school." And they were called the Sisters of Notre Dame, and they came from Eastern Canada, from Quebec, a place called Lennoxville, which is just out of Quebec city, I think, (...) but from Quebec. So they're French-speaking nuns. Six or eight of them arrived, I think, to begin with, six or eight. Somewhere in that neighborhood arrived, and they set up a high school. They bought two buildings. It was not in the "orchard area," (...) called the "orchard," and that was where the camp was. It was in the main town, village of New Denver, they bought, it was across the creek, that bridge, they bought the two houses. They bought two houses and converted them into, and they got the Japanese carpenters to go in there and convert these houses into schoolrooms, and built desks for us and everything else. And the nuns, six nuns then set up a high school and they had one priest. And so they set up this, what they call -- now it was called Notre Dame High School. [Laughs] It was Notre Dame, it wasn't the same Notre Dame of Notre Dame fame, but the sisters, who were called Sisters of Notre Dame Des Anges.

TI: Now, why didn't, I mean, given that through one through eight, you had, you were able to find Japanese Canadians to teach class, why couldn't you do that in high school, too? You had some university-trained...

HS: Well, there were very few, enough, there weren't enough... in some other places, yes, they were able to do that. In New Denver, the sisters got in there first and said they would do this, so, of course, right away, there was no need for, to... 'cause they had teachers that were of that level.

TI: Okay, so, I mean, so if they didn't show up, probably you would have done something...

HS: They would have done something. There was, but they were thinking more in terms of correspondence courses because there wasn't enough, there wasn't enough schoolteachers to go around. It was all, all the best schoolteachers that they were, people that were qualified were pretty-well used up in doing the grade one to eight.

<End Segment 45> - Copyright © 2006 Densho. All Rights Reserved.