Old School, Old Soul--Part I

Southside Elementary School in Sanford, Florida

I love old schools. In my opinion, there's nothing like them, and I take it personally when a magnificent building of my enchanted past has been repurposed for such an inglorious fate as public apartments or an assisted living facility. But that's exactly what happened to two beloved schools of mine that I always wanted to reenter one day and that I have subconsciously revisited in my thoughts all these years. Of course, I know that even if I found the doors open to my curious eyes and even if the buildings were still operative as schools, I wouldn't find the charm I remember experiencing back then. And I wouldn't find myself, like something out of a Dickens novel, sitting at that same table where I first felt the tug on my seven-year-old heart to become a teacher.

I have always wanted to be true to the wonderment I found in those humble classrooms with their cheery seasonal bulletin boards and finger paint projects tacked up for display. I can still see the green cursive alphabet border spanning the length of the blackboard when I was in third grade. What a sacred task is that of teaching a child to read and to write! But who would have thought that some of the things I so painstakingly learned--like writing in cursive or memorizing my multiplication tables--wouldn't be required today? To me, those things are every bit as important now as they were then, and I can't imagine school without them. In a way I haven't consciously thought about, I have wanted my teachers to know that I stored in my soul everything they taught me and that I have passed it on to my own students to the best of my ability over the past thirty-five-plus years. I have wanted them to know that their labors were not in vain but that their lifework has stood the test of time.

How I wish I could say that for those old buildings! Probably my favorite school ever was Southside Elementary School in Sanford, Florida. Built in 1922, less than five years after the end of the First World War, this storybook building served its purpose for sixty-two years before being set aside for reasons unknown to me. I attended there from 1969-1972 for first, second, and third grade. Yes, that was a long time ago! I don't remember wishing we had air conditioning, but, then again, we didn't start school until after Labor Day. We had something better than air conditioning, anyway. We had the magic of fresh air blowing across the classroom as birds sang among the live oak trees just outside the open windows. We also had a cross breeze from the transom window above the classroom doorway. The Orlando Sentinel describes Southside as a "magnificent building," which makes me feel as if my childhood amazement was not unfounded. No other school in Florida ever captured the charm of the Old South like Southside did. Nor did the teachers seem like family the way they did there.

I have returned to these grounds three times over the years. The first time was in 1986, fourteen years after my family had left Sanford to move to Largo, Florida. By this time, we had been living in Michigan for twelve years. Having gone through middle school, high school, college, and my first year of teaching when I laid eyes once again on my beloved school, I found it a bit gloomy. It had lost something. It was just another building, as empty and lonely as a lost soul. Nothing moved anywhere. I didn't get to go inside. I didn't know at the time that the school had closed two years before. I moved back to Florida with my family the following year to begin my own journey teaching in a public high school.

Southside Elementary School in Sanford, Florida in 1986

My second visit to Southside in 1993 or 1994--about eight years later, after I had been gone from the school for 22 years--seemed a bit cheerier. There's the big oak tree outside the window, and there's my dad walking down the sidewalk like he did with me twenty-five years earlier, holding me by the hand and depositing me with anxious care at my classroom door. I didn't know that the school had been used as administrative offices by this time. We didn't get to go inside. Memories, just memories--trying to keep them alive, trying to match the fairytale sense of days gone by with the reality of teaching high school in an overcrowded building. In two more years, I would leave Florida to return to school fulltime on a graduate assistantship to earn my Master's degree in English.

Southside Elementary School in Sanford, Florida in 1994

Three's a charm, right? My third time returning to Southside was in the summer of 2000, after I had been away from there as a student for 28 years. This time, the school was for sale. I groped in my mind for a way to buy it. I had left South Carolina with almost nothing, after earning my Master's and having taught one year at the university's academy. Southside looked the best to me it had yet in all these years, even though it also looked the worst. This time I peeked in the windows. My parents and I felt free to walk around since it was up for sale. I dreamed and puzzled and tried to orient myself, but something was very wrong. It hurt me with a physical pain when I saw mounds of trash reaching way up the walls and discarded office furniture strewn haphazardly across dismally carpeted floors. The interior had lost its life entirely, to lie buried in chaos and shame. Paint peeled away from the front doors, but I stood there anyway, ready for a fresh start of any kind, even in my own imagination. I felt free after having endured oppressive control at a bastion of learning I wanted to forget.

Southside Elementary School in 2000, sixteen years after it had closed. It was for sale!

Notice the engraved Bible at the peak, looking down on the wise owls.

Two things were the same: the large wise owls still guarded the front steps leading up to the double doors of the façade with the Bible engraved at the peak, and the huge live oak trees still shaded the playground where nobody played. Spanish moss still draped spookily from their limbs. And somehow, I knew I was home. I wanted to rescue my school from harsh hands and unloving eyes. I wanted to buy it and restore it and open my own school where children felt loved and valued as individuals instead of feeling like everybody had to be the same. I didn't know until many years later that the school finally sold for $250,000, less than I paid for my current house in Tennessee.

The story goes that the owls were designed to scare the pigeons away.

I say I felt at home, but I also felt disoriented and confused as I continued to peer inside any available window, like an explorer seeking accidental admittance into an abandoned Victorian house. The layout was off; the floorplan didn't match my imagination at all. I squinted hard in my mind's eye to find that image I had so loved of sunlight bouncing off clean hardwood floors as I walked down the halls to the cafeteria. I finally found one thing that I thought I remembered--an inner courtyard looking into a hallway of windows, I think leading to the upstairs auditorium. The auditorium alone, with its heavily draped stage and wooden seats accommodating 350 people, was a rare treat to visit when I was in school. Once, we got to climb those magical stairs like something out of Peter Pan to watch a movie named, The Hound that Thought He Was a Raccoon.

I found out recently that this dignified and impressive building, fashioned like an echo of the world before the War to End All Wars, has since been restored as faithfully as possible--even to the preservation, I think, of the grand auditorium--and turned into an assisted living facility. I'm sure it has been rewired and replumbed with air conditioning added and probably some elevators, but I know the hardwood floors have been refinished and the bones left intact. I am so thankful that my childhood memories have a place to go, after all. Old school, old soul--who knows? Maybe some Southside alumni fifteen years older than I have come back to sleep in school!

This is a picture of my first grade classroom with Mrs. Welsh. It always bothered me that she died the year after I had her. No wonder she seemed so old and sometimes kind of prickly and mean. But she taught me to read, and for that I will forever thank her. I loved every minute in this school--all except the first day, that is. I had been to kindergarten in a private school the year before but only in the mornings. Here, stranded all day in this great big school that smelled like Pine-Sol, I missed my mother and felt strange and afraid. After all, I was still only five years old for a couple more weeks. I put my head down on the blue enamel table where our crayon boxes had to line up exactly with the chunky square pencil holder. I could see my reflection on the shiny paint, and I watched myself cry. I can't say that I ever did that again. The man standing next to my teacher in the picture below was my principal, Mr. Baggett. He was Mormon and a very nice man, as far as I know.

First grade with Mrs. Welsh

Can you find me?

Second grade with Mrs. Carlton; Can you find me here?

Third grade with Mrs. Stallworth; Where's Carolyn?

The best reason that Southside remains so special to me is that this is where I first felt the call of God upon my life to be a teacher. One day, my reading group, the blue group, was asked to help the red reading group when we got finished with our work. I cannot explain what came over me as I sat beside my little friend, Dale. She seemed shy and kind of scared, like she didn't feel very smart. And, suddenly, I wanted with all my heart to crawl inside her head and understand what she didn't understand so that I could explain it to her without making her feel funny. I felt the Lord giving me the desire to help and the words to say. It was as if a light glowed within me, and I think I even felt my eyes misting over as a great love filled my heart in that moment--a divine tug from which I have never wriggled free. I was saved when I was four years old, and I know without a doubt that Jesus lived inside me and went to school with me and made me want to learn all about the vast and wonderful world He had made. I wanted everyone else to learn this, too.

This is Dale in first grade; I remember helping her in second grade

Times have changed, that's for sure. But some things never change. Even if my beloved school isn't what I remembered it to be, no one can take from me that invisible moment that only the Lord and I saw--that moment where He showed me the school in my soul.