Learning in the Big Land

Education in Labrador West grew from the same forces that shaped the towns themselves: isolation, ambition, and a determination to build a full and complete community in a place where, only a few years before, the caribou outnumbered people. While mining companies built the first houses, schools built the first sense of home for the families who arrived in the 1960s.

School segregation in Labrador West wasn’t based on race. It was based on religion. Until 1997, Newfoundland and Labrador ran a Denominational Education System protected by the Canadian Constitution. The churches ran the schools, Catholic, Anglican, United, Salvation Army, and Pentecostal, while the government paid for them. In the planned mining towns of Labrador City and Wabush, that system ran headlong into the industry’s appetite for efficiency, and the result looked very different in each town.

The Great Divide: The Denominational Era (1960s–1997)

From the town’s incorporation until the educational reforms of 1997, Labrador City operated under a “dual system.” On one side stood the Roman Catholic School Board, serving the town’s large population of Irish descendants and Francophone families. On the other stood the Integrated School Board, serving the Protestant denominations. For a child growing up in Lab City during this era, the path was predetermined.

The Integrated Stream

The Protestant system was characterized by its expansive facilities and close ties to the mining management hierarchy.

It began at C.E. McManus School, named after Charles E. McManus, a senior figure in the Iron Ore Company of Canada. This was the primary school, Kindergarten to Grade 3, where the children of engineers and miners first learned to read.

From there, students moved on to A.P. Low School, named for the geologist who first mapped the Labrador Trough. It handled Grades 4 to 7 and prepared students for the big school across town.

At the top of the Integrated stream was Menihek High School. Opened in the early 1960s, Menihek was the flagship: large, modern, and imposing, with a gymnasium big enough to split in two with a curtain. This was where the “Menihek Magic” took hold, a run of success in drama and basketball that the school built around its facilities and its size.

The Catholic Stream

Running parallel was the Catholic system, which often prided itself on grit and a tightly knit community spirit.

The foundation was Notre Dame Academy, located near the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. For decades, this school (initially staffed by the Presentation Sisters) provided elementary education, where faith and education were deeply intertwined.

The heart and soul of this stream was Labrador City Collegiate (LCC), located at 200 Campbell Avenue. If Menihek was the giant, LCC was the scrappy underdog. The school developed a fierce identity around its sports teams, known as “The Express.”

LCC was defined by its gymnasium, known affectionately and notoriously as “The Crackerbox.” It was tiny. The sidelines were so narrow that people in the bleachers could reach out and touch the players. Packed for a Friday night game, it was deafening, and that claustrophobic, intimidating din gave the Express a real home-court edge.

The Rivalry: Magic, Express, and Thunder

Through the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, the rivalry between Menihek, LCC, and J.R. Smallwood Collegiate was the centre of teenage life in Labrador West. Every year the three high schools fought to represent the region at the provincial championships in boys’ and girls’ basketball, volleyball, and soccer. The packed gyms, the rival colours, the roar of the crowd: for anyone who grew up there, those nights are among the sharpest memories they have.

The Wabush Experiment

While Labrador City’s kids were locked in their three-way rivalry, something different was happening in Wabush. There, the mining company’s practical streak produced an experiment that was decades ahead of its time. Wabush Mines simply would not pay for two separate high schools in a town that small. What it built instead was J.R. Smallwood Collegiate.

Opened in 1963, the school was a “joint service” building, a quiet admission that the two sides would have to meet in the middle sooner or later. It had two distinct wings: the Catholic Wing (Sacred Heart), run by the Catholic School Board, and the Integrated Wing, run by the Protestant board. Between them sat the shared facilities neither board could afford on its own, the gymnasium, the library, and the science labs.

Students would enter through the same main doors every morning, only to turn left or right depending on their religion. In the early years, the separation was strict. But practical necessity soon chipped away at the walls. By the 1990s, it became inefficient to teach “Catholic Math” and “Protestant Math” to smaller classrooms, leading to the integration of most academic subjects. This forced proximity meant that the youth of Wabush grew up with a level of social integration unknown in other Newfoundland towns.

Teaching in a Fishbowl

To teach in Labrador West before 1997 was to sign over more than your working hours. Teachers were employees of the denominational boards, not the government, so you weren’t hired only for how well you taught. You were hired for how you lived.

Contracts came with strict, legally binding “morality clauses.” A Catholic teacher could be fired for conduct “unbecoming of a Catholic.” A Pentecostal teacher could be let go for smoking a cigarette or having a beer, even at home.

Life Under the Microscope

In the isolation of Labrador West, anonymity was a luxury that did not exist. The same priest or minister who sat on the School Board and authorized your paycheque also looked out from the pulpit on Sunday morning. Church attendance was effectively mandatory; a teacher who skipped Mass for a few weekends to ski at Smokey Mountain might find themselves pulled aside on Monday morning for a “quiet word.”

The Ashuanipi Social Club (“The Ash”) was the centre of local nightlife, and for teachers it was a minefield. Anyone seen drinking too heavily on a Saturday night could expect a report to the Board by Monday.

The “Thou Shalt Nots”

The morality clauses turned personal life choices into fireable offences:

• Interfaith Marriage: A Catholic teacher wishing to marry a divorced Protestant often faced an ultimatum: your fiancé(e) or your career.
• Divorce: In the Catholic system, filing for divorce was often grounds for immediate dismissal or a permanent block on promotion to administration.
• Pregnancy: For female teachers, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy was an automatic termination.
• Common Law: Despite the severe housing shortage in Labrador City, living with a partner before marriage was strictly forbidden.

The Cold War at J.R. Smallwood

Nowhere did this get more absurd than in the hallways of J.R. Smallwood Collegiate in Wabush, where two separate staffs worked under one roof and taught the same students under very different rules. A teacher in the Integrated Wing might keep their job through a divorce, while a colleague teaching the same subject thirty feet down the hall in the Catholic Wing would be fired for it.

A Unified Legacy

Following the Mount Cashel scandal and two provincial referendums, the denominational system was finally dissolved in 1997. For the first time in the history of Labrador West, teachers could live their lives without fear of the Monday morning report.

Today the old rivalry of the “two solitudes” lives only in the memories of the alumni. A student at Menihek now walks halls that belong to the whole community. The “Magic” is still there, but it no longer turns on who it leaves out. It belongs to all of Labrador City’s young people now.