School on Wheels: Reaching and Teaching the Isolated Children of the North

David Mattison is a librarian with the B.C. Provincial Archives and
Records Services Library.

Fred Sloman and his wife Cela spent nearly 40 years living and teaching northern Ontario children inside a mobile schoolhouse, a converted railway car. Fred Sloman taught in the CNR car over the normal school year while his wife raised their own family. This special service was begun in 1926 and offered by CNR and CPR, and later by the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario railroads. At its peak during World War Two the school-on-wheels program taught 226students at one time. Today’s budget-conscious school administrators would probably never dream of starting such a service with such a low pupil-teacher ratio. The minimum class size was four, and the children did not always return for the entire school year.

The Slomans and a few others dedicated a good part of their lives to these grateful students at great personal cost. This small book, centred on the Slomans’s example, is a fitting tribute to their idealism and devotion to their pupils in the face of many adversities.