For 150 years, a school has stood on the corner of Pandora Avenue and Vancouver Street— first St. Louis College and then St. Andrew’s Elementary.
Students and teachers filed out of St. Andrew’s for the last time on Thursday afternoon — the last day of the school year — sad about the school’s closing but looking forward to the future.
“I know every family and child’s name,” said Kim Forget, who worked at the school for nine years as a special-education assistant and has a son in the Grade 1 class.
“It was a total community,” Forget said. “It’s heartbreaking that this was the school that had to go.”
With two Roman Catholic elementary schools in the area competing for students, and facing expensive seismic upgrades, the Diocese of Victoria decided to amalgamate St. Andrew’s with St. Joseph’s Elementary at 757 West Burnside Rd. and sell the Pandora site.
“The first thing you want to do is keep children safe,” said Keefer Pollard, St. Andrew’s principal, speaking of the need for upgrades. “It’s sad. But we have a bright future ahead of us.”
Staff and students will be dispersed among other Catholic schools.
Vancouver-based Blue Sky Properties wants to build more than 200 units in a six-storey wood-frame building over ground-floor retail and professional office space on the Pandora site.
The school opened as St. Louis College in 1863 and became St. Andrew’s in 1968. The school enrolled about 180 students from preschool to Grade 7.
Jim O’Reilly spent more than three decades as a student, teacher and principal at St. Louis and St. Andrew’s.
O’Reilly said the living conditions for the Christian Brothers of Ireland, which took over the school in 1914, hovered on the poverty line until a house was bought for them. Some would sleep in the attic of the school, and mothers of schoolchildren would routinely bake bread to help feed them.
O’Reilly returned to the school in 1978 as a music and English teacher, as it transitioned from being run by the Christian Brothers to a board.
“What struck me was the commitment of the staff,” he said. “They were used to pulling together.”
He left the school in 2002 to work with the Diocese of Victoria but stays in touch with his fellow alumni.
St. Louis alumni hope to keep the memory of both schools alive with a scholarship program for Catholic schools in Victoria.
“The whole experience, of people guiding me and the sense of developing yourself as a person, was life-giving,” O’Reilly said.
