Studying the history of the ‘C word’
So, I’ve been working on this special project that allows me to do deep dives into our archives here at the Tribune-Phonograph.
I find it utterly fascinating to see how much the paper I work for has changed so much over the decades, while also remaining essentially the same in so many ways (all those stories about school board and city council meetings.) My goal with this project is to develop a comprehensive history of school consolidation in this area. This idea hit me sometime after our two local school boards starting talking about the dreaded “C word” last summer when a bill was introduced in the legislature to offer financial incentives for merging districts.
I haven’t heard much about that bill since then, but it prompted me to start thinking about all of the times I have seen the phrase “school consolidation” in the pages of our bound volumes, going back to the 1960s or even earlier. I got in the habit of making a note to myself when I ever saw the topic come up, whether it was in 1961 or 1990.
Still, I never really developed a clear timeline in my head as to how our current school district boundaries came to be. For someone like myself who came from outside the area, it still seems strange to think about kids from Dorchester taking school buses through the Abbotsford School District, right past the K-12 campus, on their way to school in Colby. Of course, I’ve long heard rumblings about the schism between Dorchester and Abbotsford, and the long-standing “rivalry/feud” between Abby and Colby.
I realized I had to learn more about the short-lived “Dor-Abby” School District formed in the early 1960s, and the subsequent break-up of the district that resulted in Dorchester families sending their students to Colby. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve taken whatever “free” time I have to page through the books from 1960, 1961 and 1962. The whole issue is a lot more complicated than I initially realized, due to all of the one- and two-room school houses that existed in this area and slowly got swallowed up into the two school districts we have today.
Based on what I’ve already learned, I figure I still have a long way to go before I fully understand how the districts developed into what they are today. Little details along the way intrigue me, like how Abbotsford decided to drop the Panthers mascot and Dorchester exorcised the Red Devils in favor of the Falcons.
My hope is to one day coalesce all of this research into a story for the paper, one that gives a decently complete overview of the consolidation saga that has played out over the past half-century. For me, at least, it’s hard to know where we’re going until we have a good idea of where we’ve been.
OUT FOR A WALK
KEVIN O’BRIEN
EDITOR
