Maureen Boulter

Obituary

Maureen Patricia Boulter (1930-2024) passed away peacefully in the bright chilly early afternoon, Saturday February 24, in Southampton Care Center.

She was always deeply involved in her community, in Toronto, and was one of the founders, and on the Board of Directors of LAMP (Lakeshore Area Multiservices Project), even past her retirement. She taught for 27 years, from 1969 until her retirement, in the Etobicoke Board of Education, leaving behind a wealth of knowledge in the hearts and minds of hundreds of children. First posted to “The Elms” in Rexdale, she became an indispensable part of the “Special Education” programs and brought the joy of reading and life skills as ‘Librarian at large’ in many of the primary schools in the borough. Having spent a formative part of her own childhood with her dear brother “Sonny”, feeling the horrors of WWII, which included seeing her beloved step-father John Lane being treated as traitorous and yet suffering without complaint all the humiliations heaped upon him of his firmly held ‘conscientious objection’ to violence of any sort, she became an implacable defender of those with less opportunity, and worked tirelessly at bettering the administrative policies of the ’70s and ’80s. She was the first educator (in Etobicoke anyway) to develop in-class computer usage, since when the boxes arrived at schools with not much more than “On” switches and “floppy disks” to write in BASIC on, no one else did. Her own education was ‘English grammar school’, and if her marriage had not intervened, there’s really no telling where her scholarship to Cambridge reading Mathematics might have led…

She was a resident of Long Branch from 1968-84, then Mimico from 1984-2012, before moving out of Toronto to the space of her ‘summer house’ in Wiarton 2012-2019, to enjoy her well-earned retirement.

She will be greatly missed and remembered by her son Chris Boulter, her daughter-in-law Victoria Boulter, her grandchildren Kit Boulter and Patricia Boulter (Michael Mackey), and her great-grandchildren Callum and Rowan Mackey.  Her other sons Alan Boulter and John Boulter. She was predeceased  by the father of her 3 sons, David W S Boulter (1932-2018).