Can we talk?

The Old School Building

      I don't hear much about my old high school any more. It's been turned into a rather nice, functional county office building. The football field is the lower parking lot. It's remembered primarily for its transformation from a run-down, out-grown high school into a beautiful government building.

      My school was the only school in town during my illustrious school years. Immediately prior to my experience, there had been separate schools for black and white. Since public schools at that time meant elementary, grades 1-7, and high, grades 8-12, joining them would be over-crowding, so new schools were being built to accomodate the middle school years. These new schools would take 7th grade out of the elementary schools, helping them, and 8th and 9th out of the high school. But the new schools weren't ready, and integration couldn't wait according to the courts.

      To accomodate the situation, the 8th graders were split in half. One half went to high school in the morning, then at noon walked up hill en masse to the very old abandoned and small elementary school, where we spent the remainder of the day. Meanwhile, the other half of the 8th grade went down the other side of the road to the high school. At the high school, where we all preferred to be all day, you studied music, art, gym, math,and drama and miscellaneous subjects. At the smaller school, you had English, history, and science.

      To make matters worse, the housing area across the street from the high school had just been emptied and bulldozed as part of the city clean-up. The residents had moved on to government housing or other better places. The mice ran across the four lane road to the high school. Students from the previous year had experienced mice living in their lockers and eating their lunches. The mice were mostly exterminated by the time I got there, but the memories lived on in my school mates' minds.

      The school was situated just off Vinegar Hill (for the moonshine district during prohibition), at the bottom of the hill from Main Street. It was easy to go down town for a Coke after school. The back parking lot was up against a wooded embankment along the railroad tracks above the school. It was more obvious from the bleachers in the stadium. It was easily accessible.

      Being the only high school in town, it was a showcase of every possible sentiment in town. If my years were an indication, it was a topsy-turvy town with many extremes, running on fear and gossip. The new schools weren't ready by the end of my 8th grade year. The officials knew it had been a disastrous experiment in learning. So new plans had to be made for the following year. By the time I graduated, we were told we were the meanest, unruliest class of kids ever known in school history. We had only the school system to blame, and all of us kids knew it.