wishing to return to purchase his family’s farm in 1970; he was persuaded against it by relatives and business advisors, who warned him he would be on welfare within a year. He took their advice, and kept his job with a manufcaturing company in Toronto]6 The family farm was purchased by the RBI Land Development Corporation, and leased to a large farm corporation, specializing in frozen foods.

Education was the second aspect of the Island’s culture that began to undergo drastic changes in the 1950s and 19603. Throughout the early 19505 there were numerous criticisms voiced in the media about education in P.E.I. The criticisms from a meeting of the Kinkora area teachers were typical: a shortage of fully qualified teachers, the need for higher salaries, and inadequate teaching resources in the schools, especially in poorer districts]7 Others criticized the fact that many students were leaving school by the eighth grade without adequate labor skills; and still others called for larger and fewer schools. In the 1950s P.E.I. had 469 school districts}8 The majority of schools (81%) were one- room schools in which one teacher taught students in all grades, one through ten; and over half of the teachers had not even completed junior matriculation (grade ten)?9

By 1955 the RBI. Department of Education began to deal with the crisis by removing grades nine and ten students from the one room schools and transporting them to larger school districts.20 By 1957 grades nine and ten had been removed from 75 one—room schools.21 This was the start of school consolidation on a grand scale, a process which would reduce the number of schools in RBI. to 70 by 1978.22

In the five communities a kind of voluntary consolida- tion had been going on since the 19303. In 1935 Kinkora began using the former convent of the Sisters of St. Martha, adjoining the parochial house, to accommodate grade nine and ten students, of whom there were 26: 15 from Kinkora,

117

and the others from Borden, Emerald, Maple Plains, Newton and Shamrock.23 In 1946 Newton sent all its ninth and tenth grade students to Kinkora.24 A policy of accep— ting students at Kinkora schools from other districts was formalized in 1951 in an agreement made between the Kinkora school trustees and St. Malachy’s Parish by which St. Malachy’s Parish would donate money toward the building of a new four—room school in Kinkora in return for assurances that students of St. Malachy’s parishioners outside Kinkora would be accommodated in grades nine and ten.25 The Parish donated $10,000.00, and a new four- room school was built for students from grades one to ten, in 1952-53.

The transfer of grades nine and ten from small school districts to larger ones became official government policy in 1955. Further consolidation followed. By 1956 Newton school discontinued teaching the seventh and eighth grades. In 1958 the Maple Plains school closed permanently. And in that same year, by government policy, grades nine and ten students from Middleton, Shamrock, Central Bedeque

and South Freetown were transferred to Kinkora High

Elementary School built at Kinkora, 1952 (Author’s Collection)