Education

Education in Hastings County began in one-room schools, sometimes as instruction in private homes, with each school and its tiny budget governed by a small group of local residents known as trustees. Today's school boards with their massive budgets oversee education in schools distributed across huge land areas encompassing more than one county.

In pioneer days children walked to school or rode horses through the forests and along muddy trails. Today dozens of bright-yellow school buses criss-cross the county on paved highways, covering each day the equivalent mileage of several trips across Canada.

Belleville 's first school was said to have been a log cabin located near the Moira River where John Watkins taught about 1810. Six years later, the first school board was formed. It was only in the late 1840s that primary education became compulsory with the passage of the Common School Act.

By 1860, under the management of eight trustees, five common schools operated in Belleville. A County Grammar School was erected in the 1840s and at the time it was the only one in Hastings County. A Senior County Grammar School Board merged in 1871 with the Belleville Board of Common School Trustees, which had been organized in 1850, to form a board of education. It was composed of 14 common-school trustees, six high-school trustees and one appointee from the Separate School Board. Townships often had their own school boards, governing the one- and two-room schools within their jurisdiction. At one time there were 5,747 school sections in Ontario. Today there are 72 school districts.