Jonnie Comet
20 May 1998
My old school has died. I was by there today and stopped to look at it. The grass has grown tall and the yard is littered with trash, not thrown there carelessly, only blown there by the weather and never taken up by the maintenance men. There used to be dozens of maintenance men, every day, driving round in tall 4-wheel-drive Ford pickup trucks in dark red or dark green with ugly black wheels and tall skinny tyres. The trucks all had manual shift– everyone drove manual shift back then. We used to see them creep by the windows when the guys were doing work in the yard, with the narrow lettering ‘Willingboro Township Public Schools’ stencilled proudly on the doors. The guys wore work suits with their names on them and worked quietly– I do not remember ever hearing any of them yell out loud or swear during school hours. They were hard-working men and reverent of the tasks they were performing. They knew, as even we did, that they were doing them for us.
We, the schoolchildren, were the pride of the whole
township. We came to the new development
when it was still an experiment, and we proved the founding fathers (seems so
strange calling men in their 30s and 40s ‘founding fathers’!) were right. Our class in particular was the very elite,
the creme de la creme of the entire district.
By the time we would graduate high school, there would be an even 1000
of us in all, having attended 13 elementary schools and two junior-high schools
through 30-plus students per class and split sessions and intra-district busing
and some of the most unconventional and even fanciful educational programmes
the state had ever seen. By and large we excelled where educators expected only
better-than-average; we were sought by university recruiters all over the
country and were accepted wherever we chose.
We broke the mould and made a new one, and our aggregate achievement and
attitude spoiled the teachers rotten forever.
As students in the township we were never to be rivalled.
I walked up to the windows of the kindergarten wing, in the
corridor on the way to the multipurpose room– there were only two kindergarten
rooms, because in the days when this school was built mothers were home and
there could be half-day sessions. I was
in K-2, in the afternoon class, because I was older and would not need a nap. The last class of children painted flowers
and grass on the inside of the windows, and little construction-paper clouds
and suns dangle above them. Inside, everything remains as I remember– the
little ceramic water-fountain, the blue tile of the toilet, the grey marble of
the wash-up sink, the light switches so close to the teacher’s closet
door. Above the three snaking rows of
flimsy fluorescent lights, I measured the room by counting ceiling tiles–
imagine a kindergarten classroom 26 by 40 feet!
It was immense– a whole world behind that polished birch door. In that
world we learned common courtesy (there was such a thing then), and how to
write our telephone numbers and addresses.
We heard stories and built with blocks and did not look under the girls’
dresses (little girls all wore dresses then).
The teacher kissed us goodbye when we left, and we knew it was not to be
polite, but because we were loved.
The floor looks original– brown and gold asphalt tile, incredibly
well kept. The room is set with half a
dozen round or hexagonal tables and little chairs, as if pretending to ready
for a class, but there are no other furnishings in the room now. The tables are original– 37 years old at
least! –faux white-ash Formica laminate over birch plywood, very heavy, with
metallic pale-green steel legs, very Space Age, very stylish and
state-of-the-art for institutional furniture in 1962. In those days the idea of school as an
‘institution’ was still palatable. It
was the best example of an institution, where children were cherished and minds
were moulded for the greater good of all society. This is not to say that we were brainwashed–
on the contrary. We were nurtured. Our mothers stayed home in their housedresses
and shared coffee at ten and watched The Edge of Night at noon, and hung
washing out back and hoovered the carpet and waxed the floors, and when we came
home our bedrooms were tidied and our windows were open to the crisp October
air and the house smelled fresh and clean and new, like it really was, the
house and township and whole experience of what we were doing. We had jelly sandwiches and changed into our
play clothes and ran outside to do whatever it was all the other kids on the
block were doing, since there were so many of them, Walt and Mike and Barry and
Neil (or Ricky) and Elizabeth and Naomi and Paul and Robert and William and
Brent and Cybil and Marcie and Jeff and Bobby and Gary and Bryan and Wayne and
the entire extended neighbourhood. We
had more in common than we had differences; we had all moved in at the same
time and wore the same kinds of clothes and spoke the same slang and watched
the same TV programmes, and our fathers had all been in the same war. Our fathers came home, one-by-one, from jobs
in Philadelphia which could support their families in the lifestyle of their
dreams, and one by one the kids of the neighbourhood would cry with joyous
voice, ‘Daddy’s home!’ –and then every game would be split up till tomorrow,
because there would be hugs or presents or news to share, and then dinner, then
homework, then baths, and then another day of the same thing, all autumn and on
through the winter and into the spring.
When summer vacation came we fled the hallowed halls of our
school, never appreciating that our own children would not know such comfort or
sense of purpose. We pretended to hate school,
but inside perhaps we all knew that it was crucial to our well-being, and we
all attended all the time. We did
homework and read the book and studied for tests. When the teacher told us to sit, we sat. We did not talk back. Those who did were severely ostracised. I can remember the horrid feeling of staying
after school for some minor misinterpretation of the class rules (for none of
us was ever truly bad), and sitting there alone in a quiet room with all the
chairs put up on the desks, their metallic light-green legs surrounding me like
some foreboding institutionalised forest, while the teacher worked quietly at
the teacher’s desk, grading homework or quizzes and pretending not to notice
how awful I felt, even as the tears of knowing I had somehow transgressed the
boundaries of what was expected of me by the school and the teacher and my
peers and my mother (worst of all!) streamed out of my eyes. We all knew that there were expectations for
us to meet, and we knew that meet them we surely must. Dissent was unthinkable. One day in fourth grade about twelve of us–
almost half the class– decided en masse that we would rather play dodge-ball
than report to choir practice, so when Mrs Joyce insisted we go, we rebelled by
announcing we had all quit the choir. She gave us some very stern words of
disapproval and made the defiant dozen sit silently in our seats, writing a
three-paragraph essay on something like why things like choir are important,
and none of us played dodge-ball that day– or failed to report to choir
practice next week. Thirty-five years
hence, a teacher would have been hauled in front of a Board hearing for
infringing upon our rights, and the ACLU would never have let go of it.
The changes in educational philosophy have been dramatic, but
they are not to blame for the closing of the old school. With a mindset of centralisation and falling
population, or falling school attendance, the township committee have obviously
elected to let it die. This is the new
renewal theory: demolition by attrition. J Cresswell Stuart Elementary School (named for the orchard grower whose
lands made up most of the early development) is the oldest one in the township,
needs plenty of maintenance and is now surrounded by shopping centres and too
much traffic. It has become redundant; and Willingboro has fiscal problems. They need revenue desperately, and
liabilities must be neutralised at any cost.
Even so, however unsentimental, no councillor can ever happily
sign an order to demolish a perfectly viable school. It may not even matter if the accountants
swear that removal of insulation or whatever will cost more than the building
is worth as a community asset. There is
something profoundly disheartening about terminating a school building. It represents the passing of something that
can never measured in cash value nor superseded by something ‘new and
improved’. It is akin to the removal of a gravestone or the replacement of a
wedding ring. A school building is only
so much brick and steel to one who never attended there. But, to those who did, it is the very memorial
in material form to what those experiences therein have wrought.
As I peered in between the painted flowers on the windows, I
noticed the clock is an hour off. It was never changed for daylight savings
time. It occurred to me that it will
probably never be changed again. No, I
thought. This place will never be
brought up to the times. Too much has
changed already, and that time is gone forever. The clock is a symbol of the school; it is slightly behind the time to
which we have come now. There is such a
thing as progress, and such a thing as being stupidly uninterested in the
values of the past. Something transpired
in this room long ago that can never be recaptured, if only because the people
who could now effect it never went to school here. It is not part of their
past, and so, as with too many Americans, the experience of someone else is
irrelevant to them. They are blind to
anything but what they know personally.
They did not grow up in our class, where we learned to notice the world,
inspect the world, understand the world– the whole world, as far as Telstar and
Cape Canaveral and Vistadome and Chromacolor
could help us see. If we were a
homogeneous community, at least we were an educated and enlightened one. Our parents chose this township and this
school for us because they knew better.
They chose for us a life better than the lives they might have known, a
township where their values could remain secure while the prospects for their
children could be broadened. Their
houses were not ‘investment property’ for them– they were our homes. We went to school because we were raised to
believe school was important, not because it was a place for childminders to
deposit us on the way to work. We
belonged in school– there was simply never a question about that. Our school was our garden, where we were fed
and cared for and nurtured, and, when necessary, pruned back a little; and we
always knew, though we never consciously acknowledged it, that one day we would
no longer be physically part of the garden, but that the garden would always
still be there, bearing at least some small reminder of having known our
presence there, just as we would forever bear the fruits of having been there
too.
The yellow and green paint of the flowers painted on the windows
has faded, having baked in the sun over a year now. I wondered if the children
who painted them ever come back from wherever they are going to first grade now
to see their handiwork, and what they think of its still being here, with no
new children to see it and appreciate it. Then I worried about what will become
of their painted garden into which they had put so much happy effort and which
they had been so delighted to see every day. It was a difficult thought to
consider for me, but I decided that someday, when the workmen come to dismantle
the building, I hope they just accidentally break the glass and then have to
get it out of the way without another thought. Who, who had ever been a
kindergarten child, could bring himself to shatter those windows?
* * *
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