The first schools on Grand Manan Island, New Brunswick, were started shortly after the arrival of the first English-speaking settlers in the eighteenth century, with schools built in each settlement as soon as the settlers were able. Until 1943, education was an activity of each village, with some students going to other village schools for later grades when those grades were not offered in their own villages.

New Brunswick’s, and in turn Grand Manan’s, education system became increasingly centralized as the century progressed. In the first half of the 20th century, education was administered and funded by county-level governments. By the late-1940s, mainland communities were establishing regional school districts to give rural students the opportunity to have a full high school education. Parents on Grand Manan asked for similar opportunities, and a high school was established on temporary quarters in the 1943-1944 school year. Grand Manan’s new consolidated high school was opened in Grand Harbour in 1949.

The next wave of changes came in the late-1960s. First, in 1967, a new high school opened behind Grand Harbour’s old high school, and the latter was turned into a junior high. Next, in 1968, as part of the provincial government’s Equal Opportunity program, the Department of Education in Fredericton assumed administrative and financial responsibility for education throughout the province, and Grand Manan, in turn, was made School District 22. Gradually, throughout the 1970s and 80s, community schools on Grand Manan were closed, and students were bussed to the central Grand Harbour location. The junior high school became the only elementary school for students on Grand Manan. The elementary school on outlying White Head Island, however, remains operational in 2013.

The third and latest wave of changes began in the mid-1990s. In 1996, the Department of Education reduced the number of school districts, and, in 1997, it instituted province-wide kindergarten programs. As a result, the district office on Grand Manan was closed in 1996 (Grand Manan became part of District 10, centred in St. Stephen), and the high school was renovated and expanded in 1999 in order to accommodate students from kindergarten to grade twelve as well as a new library and gymnasium. The former junior high—the structure built in 1949—was demolished the same year that the newly expanded school re-opened.

Source: Gleneta Hettrick and Ava Griffin Sturgeon