Herzlich Willkommen in der Bowcroft Grundschule!
Located in the beautiful Bow River valley, Bowcroft School houses the German Bilingual Program as well as the K-6 Regular Program. The school is in Calgary Board of Education, Area 1, in the community of Bowness. Our growing programs offer an intensive focus on English and/or German language acquisition, artists-in-residence, a music specialist, daily physical education, opportunities for environmental and outdoor studies, numerous field trips, and smaller class sizes.
School History| Schulgeschichte
Until 1952, Bowness students had been schooled in various church basements, the Scout Hall, the eight room Main School, renamed Parkway (now Belvedere Parkway), then the four room Viscount Bennett School (now R. B. Bennett) and briefly even The Legion hall.
The opening of Bowcroft Elementary School was held February 19, 1952. Four hundred students, parents, taxpayers and city dignitaries attended. The Calgary Herald hailed Bowcroft as 'one of the most modern school buildings' in the Calgary district (this was before the new brick addition in 1967).
By that fall, the main floor was completed with six classrooms, a gym half its present size, and a small room doubling as the office and staff room.
Registration of new students was unexpectedly heavy, making it impossible to accommodate all students. Fortunately the school had been constructed for the addition of a second story. The addition of the seven classrooms on the second floor were ready to go by January 1954.
In 1967 a large addition was completed, which enlarged the gym and added 9 new classrooms and a library, which today is our newly renovated learning commons.
In the 2017-2018 school year, Bowcroft celebrated its 65th anniversary.
School Name| Schulname
The first sighting of the valley of Bowness was recorded by David Thompson in 1787. He journeyed a few miles west of the junction of the Bow and Swift (Elbow) Rivers to visit a large encampment of Peigan Indians on a broad plain.
Bowness was named sometime between 1890 and 1896. The community had always been managed by the Springbank Municipality, but by 1946 there was a real increase in growth in the Bowcroft area. In 1948 Bowness became a village and four years later, with a population of 2100, it became a town which included the Bowcroft area.
