The Yellowknife Education District No. 1 is the

public In public relations and communication science, publics are groups of individual people, and the public (a.k.a. the general public) is the totality of such groupings. This is a different concept to the sociology, sociological concept of the ''Öf ...

school board A board of education, school committee or school board is the board of directors or board of trustees of a school, local school district or an equivalent institution. The elected council determines the educational policy in a small regional area, ...

Yellowknife Yellowknife is the capital, largest community, and the only city in the Northwest Territories, Canada. It is on the northern shore of Great Slave Lake, about south of the Arctic Circle, on the west side of Yellowknife Bay near the outlet of t ...

Northwest Territories The Northwest Territories is a federal Provinces and territories of Canada, territory of Canada. At a land area of approximately and a 2021 census population of 41,070, it is the second-largest and the most populous of Provinces and territorie ...

. The district, then called Yellowknife School District No. 1, was created 1 October 1939 by Charles Camsell who was

Commissioner of the Northwest Territories The commissioner of the Northwest Territories () is the Government of Canada's representative in the Northwest Territories. Similar in certain functions to a lieutenant governor, the commissioner swears in the members of the legislative assembl ...

History

The first meeting of the district was held 24 August 1939 when three people were elected making it the first democratically elected government body in the territory. Prior to the creation of the board a provisional school board had been established in 1938. The first school in Yellowknife was the

Log School House The first building used as a school in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, Canada, is currently located on Franklin (50th) Avenue at the south end of New Town, the city's downtown section. It is a small log cabin dating to the mid-1930s. It was d ...

and Mildred Hall, of

Fort Fitzgerald Fitzgerald, also known as Fort Fitzgerald and originally Smith's Landing, is an unincorporated community in northern Alberta, Canada within the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, located south of the Northwest Territories border, and south ...

, was the first teacher. However, freeze up of the

Slave River The Slave River is a Canadian river that flows from the confluence of the and Peace River in northeastern Alberta and runs into Great Slave Lake in the Northwest Territories. The river's name is thought to derive from the name for the Slavey g ...

prevented her from arriving in Yellowknife until February 1939. Prior to her arrival classes were taught by D. A. Davies but he was not an accredited teacher. The building was and was unable to accommodate all the students at one time, thus classes were split into a morning and afternoon session. Mildred Hall was reappointed as teacher for 1939/40 and was paid $100 a month. This was her last year as a teacher in Yellowknife but she was later to sit on the school board. The school she originally taught in was designated a Yellowknife Heritage Site in 1988 and the building was moved from the Old Town to its current location next to Mildred Hall School and the board offices.

Yellowknife schools

List of schools

Notes

Mapping

* YK No. 1, * Old Log Cabin School, * J.H. Sissons School, * Mildred Hall School, * N.J. Macpherson School, * Range Lake North School, * Sir John Franklin High School, * William McDonald Middle School, * Kaw Tay Whee School, * K'àlemì Dene School,

References

External links

Yellowknife Education District No. 1 website
NWT Timeline, Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre
Yellowknife Education District No. 1 fonds. Northwest Territories Archives
{{YellowknifeNTSchools School districts in the Northwest Territories Education in Yellowknife