Bell

Bell High School
Location: Ottawa, ON
Coaches	Margaret Kerr
State Championships	1994 Reach
National Championships	1994 Reach
Program Status	Unknown
School Size	Unknown
NAQT Page	link

Bell High School is a public high school in suburban Ottawa, Ontario. While the year of the establishment of a Reach for the Top team there is unknown, Richard Mageau assisted for one year, during which the 1994 Bell team won the Reach national championship. Mageau has since assisted at other Ottawa-area high schools, and has the Ottawa city SchoolReach trophy named after him. Since the championship, Bell has only reached provincials twice.

In June 2010, Bell hosted a tournament for local grade 9 and 10 trivia players. Lisgar's two best grade 10s, who had just returned from the 2010 HSNCT, lead their teams to 1st and 2nd place as well as 1st and 2nd in individual scoring.

Bell High School currently competes in both Reach and NAQT. Their 2010 rankings were:

9th - NAQT Provincials in Guelph

4th - Reach for the Top Regionals - Ottawa

Current Team

• Aravind Pillai '11 (captain)
• Nicholas Harrison '11
• Richard Ye '11
• David Parlor '11
• Yousef Masood '11
• Kelsey Langford '11
• Eric Chen '11
• Rebecca Reid '11
• Emilie Farrell '11
• Jennifer Che '11
• Ken Caughey '13
• Mark Giles '13
• Michael Yu '12
• Brandon Zhao '13

Alumni

• Wilson Zhang '10
• Christine Irwin '10

1995 Legal Controversy

In 1995, the Carleton Board of Education had a teacher work-to-rule strike, barring teachers from participating in any extra-curricular activities. However, Reach has traditionally allowed the previous national champion a bye to the provincial tournament in the following year. Bell, being the 1994 champion, was invited to the 1995 provincials.

Though the team was supervised by people other than teachers, the Ontario Secondary Schools Teachers Federation deemed the Bell team illegal. They demanded SchoolReach to cancel the 1995 tournament if Bell participated, and ordered the Ontario public school teams to boycott their schedules matches against Bell at provincials.

The students themselves had to go to court to get a special injunction to allow them to participate. Even so, some coaches threatened to boycott, some uncooperative game officials were ejected, and one Oakville coach "screamed at them".

Nevertheless, Bell managed to play each match against actual teams and fill-in officials. There were no incidents of the students themselves complaining about the presence of Bell. The defending national champions ultimately finished third in the province, one spot short of qualifying for nationals.

A full run-down of the incident can be found in newspaper archives, specifically: "Students lose title, win respect" by Keri Sweetman of the Ottawa Citizen, May 15, 1995, page B1.

Notably, there was another work-to-rule strike the year after Mageau coached another team to the championship: 2000 Merivale.