I took a drive down memory lane today as I visited the elementary and high schools of my youth. Memory trips can be enlightening and exciting as well as disappointing and devastating. Just as I had suspected, my emotions jumped from sadness to joy several times in only three hours.
As a 5th grader through 7th grader, my life revolved around Cedar Grove Elementary School in Fairburn, GA, a tiny school that included only one class for each grade level. Forget honors classes or special education classes; in the early 1960s, we were all just thrown in together. Because the school was so small, we had Jimmie J. Lankford as our principal, but no assistant principal and no secretary.
When my family first moved to Fairburn and we enrolled in Cedar Grove, I was ahead of the class in math. So, every day, my friend Mary and I would gather our books during math time and report to the school office where we collected the lunch money that teachers had already gathered from students. We then counted it, completed the lunch report for the lunchroom manager, and then put all the money in a bank bag for the principal to take to the bank. Then we sat at the big office desk and completed our math work together and answered the telephone, “Cedar Grove Elementary. May I help you?’ We rarely had phone calls.
Not bad for 5th graders!
Cedar Grove was an Andy Griffith type of school, a school where parents knew the teachers would take care of children, a place where everyone knew everyone else, a place where few students misbehaved because we knew our misbehavior would be dealt with swiftly at school with follow-up punishment at home. Cedar Grove had an outstanding principal who loved children and who took special interest in older, struggling students in a day when coddling students was frowned upon and when retaining students (or flunking them as we called it) was the normal practice. Cedar Grove had so much heart that even a mentally retarded man in the community was allowed to play kick ball with kids during recess. (Just writing this post resurrects so many good memories.)
Cedar Grove was a strong school where students learned their “lessons” while also acquiring self-confidence, character, and determination, the kind of school most of us want for all children today.
For over four decades, my Cedar Grove memories included beautiful images of a special school, but those memories vanished immediately as I pulled into the parking lot of my former school and discovered that the building had been abandoned years before.
Abandoned.
While visiting London a few years ago, I walked around in a park built over a London church that had been destroyed during World War II. Since the land had been consecrated for a church, church authorities converted the land of the bombed church into a park to prevent any further desecration of the land.
That same protection of consecrated land seems appropriate for schools as well. It’s unnatural and even unholy to walk off and abandon a school that once housed the laughter, hopes, and dreams of so many young children. I can’t blame the school system for leaving the school and moving away because they built a newer, beautiful school a few miles away, and I have no doubt that the new school fulfills the needs of students much better than this tiny, old school ever could have hoped to serve students. Fittingly, the new school is named Renaissance Elementary School.
I just wish the school system had brought in the heavy machinery and leveled Cedar Grove to create a park instead of abandoning it.
As I walked around the back of the building and looked down the hill to the huge open fields where I had spent recess every day for three years, all I saw was underbrush and pine trees.
I hope principal Jimmie J. Lankford, an educator who took such pride in his school and who taught students how to plant flowers around the school each spring, never saw Cedar Grove in this shape.
I know he never would have abandoned the school.
Despite its dilapidated condition, Cedar Grove will always remain holy ground to me.