Grey Highlands Secondary School

Grey Highlands Secondary School is located in Flesherton, Ontario, in rural Grey County. Roughly 1200 students attend.

Early History

Grey Highlands Secondary School (GHSS) was built in 1967 as one of the many new school construction projects undertaken by Education Minister Bill Davis in order to modernize and centralize rural elementary and secondary schools. When it opened in September 1968, it became the central high school for students from three smaller district high schools, covering a collection area of approximately 195,000 hectares (750 square miles). Those smaller high schools were, in turn, converted to elementary schools, which replaced the many one- and two-room school houses that were still in operation until that time.

The first principal was E. Murray Juffs, who envisioned Grey Highlands as a multi-discipline school encompassing opportunities for education in all streams, from occupational training as a car mechanic or short-order cook, to business office training, to a liberal arts education suitable for university preparation. [cite news |author= Edna Lukianchuk |title=Lives Lived: E. Murray Juffs
work=Globe and Mail|date=November 19, 1999]

To this end, the original school incorporated four science laboratories, a greenhouse, six technical shops (auto, machine, carpentry, electrical, general, drafting), a double gymnasium, a smaller gymnasium and weight training room, an auditorium with a full proscenium arch stage, a music room with sound-proofed practice rooms, several typing and business machine labs, two home economic kitchens, a languages lab, a library with study rooms, a quarter-mile (400-metre) cinder track and football field/soccer pitch, and many classrooms.

In addition to education, student involvement in intramural and varsity sports and other activities was expected. For the first ten years, a spring musical was a major school project under the direction of mathematics teacher Eleanor Juffs that involved most students and staff in some way or another. In addition to several dozen students that appeared on the stage for productions such as My Fair Lady, Oliver!, Brigadoon, Anything Goes, Camelot, and Annie Get Your Gun, there was a full pit band, the sets were built by carpentry students, special effects were generated by the science department, and other students were in charge of audio, publicity, photography, ticket sales, ushering and backstage direction. Each musical ran for three nights, often playing to almost 3,000 people from the surrounding region.

Recent Additions

In the past ten years, another wing has been built onto the school, raising the capacity from 1,000 to 1,200 students. An elevator has also added for wheelchair access to all three stories of the science/classroom wing.

Athletic Teams

The school's sports teams are called the "Lions", except for the soccer team, which is Grey Highlands United.

Peculiarities of a Rural High School

Due to the large collection area, approximately 95% of the students travel to and from school via school bus. This large proportion of "commuters" can be a problem in terms of extra-curricular activities such as team practices and band rehearsals. During its first decade of operation, the school ran "late buses" twice a week that enabled students to participate in extracurricular activities until 5 pm. However, these were discontinued by the school board as a cost-saving measure. Recently several students have attempted to take initiatives and petition the school board to run late buses. However, at the moment, students are responsible for finding their own way home from an extracurricular activity.

The area around Flesherton is in a snow belt region, and winter storms off of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay can cause several "snow days" each year, when buses cannot safely deliver students. While this is not a problem for overnight storms when students are forced to stay home, there is always the question of whether to send students home early when a daytime storm threatens. This problem was not anticipated in the first winter of operation (1968-69), when a sudden storm stranded the entire student body and staff at the school, forcing them to spend the night in the gymnasium and auditorium. [cite book|title=Grey Highlands Yearbook: 1968-69
date=June 1969] Special procedures were developed to avoid this, including a continuously running barograph in the office of then Head of Science W.J. Brown that would warn of sudden drops in barometric pressure.

Footnotes