I remember my first two years in school as golden sunny days with a fresh breeze coming through the open windows from Mill Lake. I remember Mrs. Foreman standing on the steps in her sensible shoes, swinging the hand bell and greeting us all with a warm smile at the door of Victory Village School.
The school is long gone, as are many of the schools that Parry Sound children attended. Some are now beyond living memory, but most are fondly recalled.  
First school
The first school in Parry Sound was built in 1869, one lot south of the site of Trinity Anglican Church, at Church and Seguin. This was quite an undertaking for the community, two years before the law changed to provide free schooling for those aged 5 to 16. As Chief Superintendent of Education for Upper Canada, Egerton Ryerson was responsible for standardizing education, introducing Model Schools, and the Public School Act of 1871.
In the best photo of the school, nine youngsters sit atop the roof, beside an unfinished chimney.
The late Bert Woodhouse wrote in a school history that after Central School opened in 1884, the first school was incorporated in a large house built on the site, as its kitchen, where it remained until 1937.
Reverend George Herbert Gaviller’s 1886 pencil sketch of Trinity Church on Observatory Hill captures the large house just south of the church.
SS #1
The first school in Foley became one of the first in Parry Sound. The Village of Carrington, the capital of Foley, became Parry Harbour and then amalgamated with Parry Sound in 1887. According to the Muskoka Parry Sound Genealogy Group,  the log schoolhouse for Foley School Section  # 1 was built at the junction of the Christie Road and Parry Sound Road but was moved to the [northeast] corner of Forest Street and the Parry Sound Road [where it] became a two-room school for students in the East Ward, following amalgamation.

Central School
I never attended Central but most of my contemporaries did, and their memories often relate to the fun they had climbing up and sliding down its distinctive and forbidden fire-escape chutes.
The land for the school was transferred from “William Beatty et ux” on August 28, 1884. William Beatty and his wife Isabella were partners in everything, including property ownership, 40 years before women got the vote.
The school stood between Church and Gibson Street, facing Rosetta, until 1966. It was a handsome building with a central bell tower.  
Following Ryerson’s recommendation, one room was used for a model school, from 1890 to1907. It was closed due to lack of attendance, and teacher training for the north was consolidated at North Bay Normal School in 1909.   
By 1922, the school had been expanded to 14 rooms, with up to 45 students each.  In an essay, Vera King recalled the washroom facilities at Central, in the 1920s as: “a cold run through the snow in winter” to a long building behind the school with a thin wall the length of the building, to divide the boys side from the girls side.  She described “cubicles built over one trough-like base, and at regular intervals a wave of water splashed down the length of the convenience.  We all learned to jump, at the first indication that the tidal flow was on the way.”
The school used only nine rooms in the 1930s, but with the war it became overcrowded again, to the point that children from Bay Street, James Street, and Miller Street attended Victory School. Then came the postwar Baby Boom, and Central School could no longer contain all the primary grades.   
It was replaced in 1965 by William Beatty School, built in the playground.
Isabella Street School
Isabella School was the true boomer school. It opened, filled to capacity, in 1959, to take the pressure off the other public schools which were running in shifts. Within three years, the Isabella students themselves were on split shifts.  The school, and its student body, continued to expand until it reached a peak of 380 students. Gradually the numbers declined, and when there were just 180 students attending classes, the school was closed in 1981.
Gibson Street School
Opened in 1908, Gibson Street School served first as the Parry Sound High School, its original purpose.  Located at the north end of the playing field it shared with Central School, it was a handsome brick building standing between Gibson and Church Streets.  
The new high school, under discussion for years, was finally opened in 1951, in its current location. When I got to the re-named Gibson Street School in January 1954, it was used for Grades 5 - 8, with Ken Johnson as principal, for the postwar boomers to have what amounted to a senior public school at Gibson.  
It was still crowded.  There were two grades together in most classrooms. Mrs Elliott was our teacher in my Grade 5/6 class, and I recall large classes in every year.  Our Grade 8 class in 1957 was 48 students, with Bert Woodhouse as our teacher.  
Gibson went on for another eight years in that building, then the student body and staff moved into the new William Beatty School.  Ken Johnson remained principal of what had become William Beatty Senior School – all the town’s Grade 7 and 8 students —until he retired in 1970.  After that, all grades were fully integrated into William Beatty Public School with Bert Woodhouse as principal.
Victory Village
(lead photo)
Victory Village School was built for the children of the munitions workers living in the area.  After returning from the war, our family was fortunate enough to get one of the houses in Victory Village when my sister was born in 1946. Dad rented from Wartime Housing Limited ($30.50 per month plus $2 telephone) until a few years later, when the company must have realized that with the post-war housing shortage they could sell off the houses.  It cost $3,000.
Mrs. Ruth Foreman recorded in Then and Now,  a history of Parry Sound Schools, that the school, on the northwest corner of Riverdale Road and William Street, was owned by Central Mortgage and Housing. The company took over a classroom, then the cloakroom, leaving the Grade 1 and 2 classes in a single room, so closely packed that the students’ desks were beside her own.  
We were fortunate to have Miss Jeanne Wright, (later Mrs. Ken Johnson) teach us music. By the time we were in Grade 2, she had taught us sight-reading, and registered us in the preliminaries for the Kiwanis Music Festival. She instilled a lifelong musical appreciation.  
Mrs. Foreman, who was there from 1948 until Isabella school opened in 1959, said teaching at Victory Village was “one of my most enjoyable experiences.”  “The children were so well behaved”, she wrote, and “we were like one big family ... they seemed so happy”.  That we were.

Interesting tidbits from the school’s logbooks:
On May 20, 1910 the school was closed to mark the funeral of King Edward VII.
On February 11, 1918 it was so cold the school was closed to save fuel.
In October and November of 1918, the school was closed for four weeks because of the worldwide Spanish influenza epidemic.
Victory School, built in 1918, replaced SS #1.