Article written in the Calgary Herald about author, Bill Baergen, on his book - March 12th, 2006.

Bill Baergen holds graduated and post-graduate degrees in history and educaton, and has been a teacher, a principal, a school superintendent and a school board chairman, but he treasures memories of the one-room  school he attended as a child in southeastern Alberta.

His curiosity about the history and fate of one-room country schools has culminated in Pioneering With a Piece of Chalk: The One-Room Country Schools of Alberta.

If you want to do a real history of Alberta that's where you start - the one-room schools, said Baergen.

Alberta has had nearly 5,000 rural school districts, most of them with one-room schools.

"Though much has been written about one-room schools," Baergen writes in his preface, "what is lacking is a single volume listing all the one-room schools of Alberta and their land locations."

Baergen dove in and emerged five years later with a 620-page encyclopedia of country schools with each school district name and number, the date it was established, and its geographic co-ordinates.

"I cannot pass an abandoned country school without imagining the abundance of life it once contained." he writes, "I am invariably drawn to it."

Like all good historians, he's also a storyteller, and where he could, he has clipped in anecdotes and quirky facts that make this book downright fun, as well as informative.

For instance, the Last Chance School in Cayley district south of Calgary got its name because the taxpayers squabbled about which side of a coulee the school should be built on. Officials from the department of education made the decision and told them it was their last chance.

Ted Hinman, who later became the provincial treasurer in the Social Credit government, taught at the Sampson School in southeastern Alberta. He chuckled that when one of his students turned in an essay in praise of summer because "you only had to put your hat on to go outside."

In another school, a young girl playing a role in the Christmas pagaent got tired of being criticized and complained about how hard it was be a virgin.

Life could be tough for teachers in those country schools.

At the Prairie Echo School in the High Prairie region, the teacher - a Mr. Porter - complained in a letter to the superintendent in 1947 that he was frustrated by the class size (40 to 42 students) and by dicipline problems.

A few months later, the poor man was found dead in his teacherage.

"Promotions and failures had to be sorted out later." writes Baergen. "General dissatisfaction with discipline contributed to the closing of the school in 1953."

Anybody with any Alberta roots at all will find a connection in this book, which is likely to become an essential reference for research into Ablerta's homesteading past. It should be in every school library, as well as every archive in the province.

For more information, call Baergen at (403) 742-2471 or e-mail him at wbaerg@telusplanet.net.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

William Peter Baergen was born at Irma, Alberta, and raised on farms at Irma and Vauxhall. After graduate degrees in education and history at the University of Alberta, Bill earned a PhD at the University of Oregon in 1982. He has taught history and English at the high school and college levels, and has adminstrative experience as a principal in Whitecourt, superintendent in Stettler, board chairman of the Clearview School Division, and president of the Central Ablerta Historical Society. In addition to letters to the editor, Bill has written curriculum on Canadian history for Alberta Education and published The Ku Klux Klan in Central Alberta. With Dr. David C. Jones, he co-edited West of the Blindman: Observations of a Half Century.  In 2003, he received one of two Annual Awards from the Historical Society of Alberta for his outstanding contribution to Alberta history. He is one of seven commissioners for the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission. Bill and his wife, Donna, live in Stettler, where they raised their three children.

•  ABOUT THIS BOOK : Pioneering With a Piece of Chalk: The One-Room Country Schools of Alberta, 1885-1982, lists nearly 5,000 public schools registered in the province from Territorial days to the present. In addition to the land locations and dates of establishment of each school, the book provides -- where possible -- the origin of the names of the school, the name of the first teacher, an anecdote revealing an aspect of the school's personality, and the fate of the building.
• The book contains a bibliography of over 450 local histories, the most comprehensive list available in print today. A 1948 map showing the first school divisions, with detail to the specific township, gives this volume the right to claim a place on the shelves of our libraries, archives, and all readers interested in the early days of Alberta.
• TO PURCHASE THIS BOOK:
• Single copy - $40
• Two or more copies - $35 Includes shipping and GST. Allow 2 weeks for delivery.  Make orders payable to William P. Baergen, 4025 - 57 Street, Stettler, AB. T0C 2L1.
• For more information - contact: wbaerg@telusplanet.net 
  
• This book will also be available on Wednesday, May 10th as you tour through Heritage Square during Historic Red Deer Week / Doors Open 2006.  Visit the one-room school house which is located here.