From fountain pens to laptops, an Allandale school has been a place of learning and community spirit for well more than a century.
Students have been traipsing through the halls of 25 Burton Ave., since 1906, when the neighbourhood was a hop, skip and spit from the nearby rail yards.
At that time, it was known as Burton Ave. School, was later renamed King Edward Public School — after the Duke of Windsor, who was King of the United Kingdom from January 1936 until his abdication in December of that year — and is now the home of Unity Christian High School.
While the building has undergone many transformations over the years — various additions, upgrading classrooms to modern standards, a new boiler last year and an extensive interior renovation (more about that later) — one thing that hasn’t changed is a commitment to education, according to Unity principal Allen Schenk.
His office is crammed with day-to-day paperwork and books, and there is a tool box next to his desk, a testament to the hands-on work the nearly 114-year-old building gets, and has received, since Unity Christian High School officials breathed new life into the structure in the spring of 2010.
A couple years earlier, it had been deemed prohibitive to repair by the Simcoe County District School Board and King Edward Public School students were dispersed to other halls of learning.
But by September 2010, with the unending drive of volunteers (and professional help where needed), 25 Burton was back in business, but this time as a high school.
“In the spring and summer of that year, all the renovations were done,” says Schenk, as he looks over the refinished wood floors of the main hall — with its 14-foot ceilings — outside the main office.
“When the building was purchased, those floors were covered with linoleum tile so (at the time) it was going to be replaced with new tile and then they realized there was nice hardwood floor underneath.”
Up came the tile, which revealed nails that had been driven into the wood floor that workers at the time probably imagined would never again see the light of day.
“It was a lengthy process,” Schenk says. “All the renovations were pretty much done by volunteers. There were a few things where paid expertise was utilized, maybe for some of the electrical upgrades that were done for things like internet access.
"But all the cleaning that was done — I think the building was unoccupied for almost two years — was done by community volunteers: things like painting, washing, the floors.”
Those main-hall floors get another use when students aren’t walking over them; members of the Scottish Country Dancing Group like to practise on wood floors and put their own spin on the 114-year-old hardwood.
There used to be a bell tower on the school — long since removed — and the structure required to support that is still in the attic.
“The attic space has all this huge wood-beam construction,” he says.
By 1968, two additions had been built, one that replaced the main entrance and another that would became the performing art centre (by 2011, that addition’s windows had been bricked in), an aspect of Unity that is reflected in dozens of photos in the main hall that represent the students’ performances over the years.
The centre is also where members of the Allandale Neighbourhood Association hold their monthly meetings, at no charge.
“One of the factors that drew the original (Unity Christian High School) people who got us to the point we are at now is that this community has a heart for this school,” Schenk says. “They want this to be a school in the community and we want very much to be a part of the community.
“We try to look for opportunities to serve. Our students will go out and pick up garbage on our service days; our students will help out with yard work for seniors and we have the communal garden out in the back which helps our neighbours and the homeless of Barrie as well,” he adds. “It’s our way of making a difference and contributing to the community, and making it a place where people want to live.”
And also birds.
The school is helping the chimney swift, a threatened species which prefers to nest and roost in chimneys and other manmade structures. As the Burton Avenue building has a chimney it no longer utilizes, they are being encouraged to use it as a home.
(Anyone driving by the former Barrie Central Collegiate site on Bradford Street may notice a tall brick chimney still standing; it has been preserved — for now — for the swift.)
Love of the birds, and of life, typify what Unity Christian High School is about, says Schenk, who is the school’s second principal.
He is proud of Unity’s Christian roots and adds that, as an independent Christian school, it receives no public funding.
