Nixon Public School
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| Nixon Public School | |
| Address | |
| RR#7 Simcoe, Ontario, N3Y 4K6, Canada |
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| Information | |
| School board | Norfolk Board of Education (now Grand Erie District School Board) |
| Principal | Virginia Chambers (final principal) |
| Vice principal | Bill Clendinning (final vice-principal) |
| Administrator | Chris Lambert (final administrator) |
| School type | Public elementary school |
| Grades | JK-6 |
| Language | English |
| Team name | Knights |
| Enrollment | 150 (1999-2000) |
Nixon Public School started out as a one room schoolhouse in the mid to late 19th century. During the 1950s, the school was moved to a centralized building across the street. The one room schoolhouse was sold to become a private residence and Nixon Public School became a centralized school until was closed on September of 2001 due to cutbacks in education spending. The school was located in Nixon, which is a hamlet in Norfolk County, Ontario, Canada.
Most of its students lived an area that surrounded Lynnville, Atherton, Hillcrest, and Blayney. Children from Gilbertville and Pine Grove only attended Nixon Public School because Delhi Public School didn't have special education in the 1980s and the 1990s. Standard detentions were rarely used even in the intermediate grades and were never given to special education students. Compared to most elementary schools of its time, Nixon Public School was one of the safest schools when it came to bullying.
Kindergarten was introduced to Nixon Public School in the 1960s to help better prepare students for the first grade. Special education was introduced in the 1970s when schools began integrating the handicapped students with other children. The last program to be introduced was junior kindergarten in the late 1990s. One of the goals of the junior kindergarten program was to better prepare students for the challenges of kindergarten according to the curriculum of the 21st century. The other goal of the junior kindergarten program was to ultimately prepare the children for a more competitive workplace environment by offering them more academia at a younger age.
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[edit] School Spirit
The name of Nixon Public School's athletic teams was collectively the Knights and they participated in sports like Tee Ball, basketball, and track and field. In addition, the school also came with a baseball field which was eventually converted into grass after an agriculture-related business purchased the property and made it into an office building.
In the winter time, students used to make snow forts, sing Christmas carols, and go tobogganing on the hills of snow that would develop on the school yard. Like most school yards, the land used for recess was behind the school where students could be supervised easier. Land in front of the school was exclusively for parents, staff members, administrators, vehicles, and school buses. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the school held night dances for the older students complete with a disc jockey. Younger students could not attend the festivities because it was only for intermediate (grade 5 & grade 6) students.
The 1988 Junior Olympics was also one of the highlights of the typical Nixon Public School student. Students from all grades (including special education) were rewarded by being Nixon Public School's Student of the Week. This prestigious intramural award was given to the student with the best maturity, attitude, and efforts towards his or her academic work for an entire school week.
[edit] Special Education
Special education was introduced in the 1970s and was taught freestyle at this school. Instead of having the disabled students sit in rows, they sat in special areas with special activities being the reward for doing successful work. For example, the tape recorder had a built-in microphone for children to record their own voice on a Compact Cassette. Any surviving cassette tapes, drawings, and daily journal entries would serve today as mementos of a child's Nixon Public School years. Many parents have kept pictures that their children drew while in Nixon Public School. However, cassettes have typically been either taped over or placed in the garbage after a certain number of years. Students who misbehaved in special education got sent to the time out corner, which was a yellowish chair facing the southwest corner of the room.
[edit] Activities
Typical activities of children who attended the special educational class included language comprehension through the DLM Series, educational play in the sandbox, taking care of the classroom's companion pets, and learning how to operate two different kinds of personal computers. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, those two computers were an Apple II and a Commodore 64. The Apple II had a Sesame Street program and an Summer Olympics program for activity time while the Commodore 64 had more educational programs. One of the programs was a tic-tac-toe game that taught the students addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Other programs taught the basics of the English language like phonics and spelling. During activity time, children could write on the chalkboard except for the one near the teacher's desk; that specific chalkboard was exclusively used by teachers and the educational assistants.
[edit] Life after Special Education
By the year 1999, the special education program was renamed the multi-exceptional class in order to fully define the spectrum of the students' disabilities from very mild to very severe. In the 1999-2000 school year, there were 14 special needs students who attended the multi-exceptional class at Nixon Public School. Those 14 students represented 22% (or 2.2 out of every 10 students) of the Nixon Public School student population during 1999-2000 school year. As of the year 2008, most graduates of the Nixon Public School special education system either live with their relatives, in a group home setting, or live in a long term environment like a nursing home. However, there are some graduates who live independently with the help of the Norfolk Association for Community Living.
[edit] References
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