Sylvia Gledhill taught at Cloverdale elementary school for 30 years, but left long before it became the school of choice it is today.
“I taught in a building we called the annex, it was separate, you had to go outside and up the stairs to the main building,” Gledhill said during a visit to the school’s 100th reunion celebration on Friday.
“When they took the original school down, I taught in a portable for about four years, it was bitter cold.”
Eventually, Gledhill’s class, which ranged from Grades 2 to 5, was inside the new school built during the early 80s.
“It’s much different now,” Gledhill recalled. “The old schoolhouse was great too, it had two gymnasiums, one up and one down, that was nice.”
Cloverdale Traditional School transformed into a school of choice, with no catchment area, in September 2006 after threats of closing the school. There were about 180 students at the time and there are now over 300 with 118 students on the wait list who will not get in for the September intake.
About 100 people showed up to the Friday morning assembly where students of music teacher Fiona Jones sang original compositions, the Cloverdale Anniversary song by Michael Davies and the school song, We’re From Cloverdale.
At 4 p.m. a group of Grade 5 students dedicated the school’s new Buddy Bench, purchased as a legacy project by the 2016 Grade 5 class.