History
Work began on Ridgemont in 1957 when Prime Minister John Diefenbaker laid the cornerstone. The school opened the next year, one of a series of composite schools built by the Ottawa Collegiate Board during the 1950s and 1960s to deal with the baby boom and increasing school attendance. Ridgemont was planned and designed at the same time as Rideau High School and Laurentian High School. Ridgemont opened a year earlier than the other two.
Ridgemont is a semestered school offering many programs, such as French immersion, English as a Second Language, ECL (Everyday Community Living), and international languages (Somali, Arabic, Spanish).
Ridgemont derives the basis of its population from the surrounding neighbourhoods of Ottawa South. The Alta Vista, Ledbury, and South Keys areas of Ottawa South all feed into the school. Ridgemont is known for its high ethnic diversity: there are over 40 different languages spoken by the 850 students at the school.
Ridgemont is twinned with Bokoro High School, Butha-Buthe, Lesotho. This twinning is helped by the organization Help Lesotho and aims to promote literacy.
Ridgemont's 50th Anniversary was celebrated on October 5 and 6, 2007, with a reunion of school alumni.
Read more about this topic: Ridgemont High School (Ottawa)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“I believe that in the history of art and of thought there has always been at every living moment of culture a “will to renewal.” This is not the prerogative of the last decade only. All history is nothing but a succession of “crises”Mof rupture, repudiation and resistance.... When there is no “crisis,” there is stagnation, petrification and death. All thought, all art is aggressive.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“The history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“In the history of the United States, there is no continuity at all. You can cut through it anywhere and nothing on this side of the cut has anything to do with anything on the other side.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)