Gilmore Community School’s mission statement:
At Gilmore Community School, our mission is to provide a happy, safe, supportive and challenging learning environment where our children learn to become compassionate citizens able to contribute in a global community.
The Gilmore school building is a heritage building from 1915.
This Classical Revival school was originally designed as a two-storey four-room brick building in 1915, with a two-storey four-room addition in 1922 and an auditorium in 1929. It was built to replace a wooden schoolhouse that had been built on the site in 1912. The original section was designed by Joseph Bowman (1864-1943), a specialist in school buildings who was the school board architect for South Vancouver and Burnaby, with the additions designed after the formation of his partnership with Harold Cullerne in 1919. One of Bowman’s first designs for Burnaby was a utilitarian two-storey school that could be built with two classrooms and later expanded to eight rooms as the district’s school population grew; five schools from this design were built in 1908, and then four others in modified versions between 1910-16, including this school. This school was named after provincial politician Hugh Gilmour, but the spelling of the name was inadvertently changed by a civic clerk. The classrooms retain their thick wood doors, cloakrooms and rounded walls. The first addition was built by the contracting firm of Patterson, Cope & Thomson. Original features include the dentilled cornice that encircles the entire building and its red brick façade. The school was the first brick school in Burnaby and is the only school of this era left in Burnaby.
