Successful Initiatives 175

volved in recruiting new members and fundraising, were created in the Acadian school districts?*. In addition to awarding scholarships and bursaries, the Saint Thomas Aquinas Society gave grants to Acadian schools to purchase French books for their libraries, distributed hun- dreds of books donated by French-Canadian patriotic societies, and subscribed schools to the newspaper L’Evangéline®®. All these endeav- ours were designed to foster reading in French. As the years went by, the Society extended its work and activities with the result that it became, as we shall see, the principle voice for the Acadian community.

ACADIAN SCHOOLS

Thanks to the progress made in the educational field, the growing interest of Island Acadians in their children’s education was shown plainly by an increase in the number of schools and schoolchildren. Some one-room schools were enlarged and “graded”, in other words divided into two sections separating the primary grades from the more advanced grades. On the whole attendance was deemed to be quite good by the inspectors of Acadian schools.

In 1899, there were forty-three Acadian schools comprising fifty classrooms used by 2,226 pupils of which approximately three hundred were non-francophone. It should be noted that not all Aca- dian children had access to Acadian schools. According to the calcu- lations of Inspector Joseph-Octave Arsenault, about two hundred Aca- dian children were attending schools where French was not taught at all’. About thirty years later, Professor J.-Henri Blanchard stated that nearly half the Acadian school children, approximately eleven hundred, had to attend entirely English-language schools’'.

With regard to private schooling, the convents in Tignish, Mis- couche and Rustico continued to provide a good education for young girls. However, faced with overwhelming financial difficulties, these convents schools were forced to abandon their status as private institu- tions between 1902 and 1922 so that they could become integrated into the public school system and thus benefit from government grants. The convents were then obliged to follow the official public school curriculum which meant less French. Little by little, the French atmosphere in the convent schools diminished so that by 1942, only eight out of seventeen teaching sisters were French-speaking’?.