The first teachers in St. Helena were farmers who went door to door to teach in individual families. The first school was built in 1852, the Protestants built their own school ten years later. Jindřich Schlögl was an important teacher at the Catholic school and Ignác Bukáček, a Czech, initially worked at the Protestant school. In 1898 the schools were united by Jindřich Schlögl Jr. At the beginning of the 20th century, his older brother Jan wrote his School Chronicle from St. Helena.
In 1929-1959, teachers from Czechoslovakia were sent to St. Helena.
Under communist rule, there was a high turnover of teachers, often unqualified. A major improvement came in 1977 when graduates of the Secondary Pedagogical School in Nadlak, natives of the Czech villages in Romania, J. Dlouhý, F. Roch and A. Gecse (née Fiklová) joined the school.
Undated photograph of the old school building. (Source: Archive of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic.)
After 1989 the teaching staff fell apart, most of the teachers left in February 1990. F. Roch became the headmaster until his retirement in 2021. New teachers, natives of the Czech villages in Romania, joined the school. In 1998, teachers from the Czech Republic started working here again.
As a result of the re-emigration to the Czech Republic, the number of pupils dropped dramatically, from almost 200 in 1989 to around 30 nearly ten years later. A new school building was opened in 1998, with the Czech Republic providing $40,000 and Romania providing 150 million lei for equipment.
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Projekt byl podpořen z prostředků Ministerstva zahraničních věcí ČR v rámci projektů veřejné diplomacie.
