CHapteR 3: Buildings for Students

CHapteR 3

Buildings for students

another serious problem I faced was the dreadful deterioration of most of the school buildings in the county. Decades of “separate but equal” had resulted in dilapidated and outdated facilities. The overall condition of the physical plant was deplorable. Every child enters a physical plant for instruction, and it ought to be safe and reasonably adequate for the instructional program. So our first job was to assess the condition of each physical plant within each attendance area and establish priorities, since we didn’t have enough funds to work on all of the problem areas at once.

In a school system the size of Macon County, which was in excess of 600 square miles, we had a variety of schools located in different parts of the county: west Macon, south Macon, east Macon, north Macon, and the Tuskegee area (the county seat and approximate geographical center of the county). So we also had to consider the communities in each area. In west Macon, known as the Shorter area, we had three schools: a K–3 school that fed into a 4–7 school that fed into an 8–12 school. The K–3 school was called Prairie Farms, and that was descriptive. The middle school was Shorter School, which fed into D. C. Wolfe High School. Shorter is about eighteen miles west of Tuskegee. In south Macon, we had a K–12 school called South Macon Elementary and High School, which was located about twelve miles south of Tuskegee. In the northern part of the county, we had an all-black school that was K–7, under segregation. That school fed into Tuskegee Institute High School, which was desegregated before I came to Macon County, as described in the introduction. There was also a K–12 school in the town of Notasulga, which was about nine miles north of Tuskegee. The elementary portion was the only

all-white school when I went to Tuskegee in 1970. Notasulga High School, however, was integrated. There was also an elementary school, Nichols, located to the east of Tuskegee, whose students were bused to Tuskegee for high school. Within the city of Tuskegee were four elementary schools: Lewis Adams, Washington Public, Children’s House (on the Tuskegee Institute campus), Tuskegee Public, as well as Tuskegee Institute High School.

We had to make a comprehensive study of all of the physical plants in the county—comprehensive because historically, when one section of the county learned that the board was spending some money in another section, they all descended on the board while saying, “Well, they got money down there to spend, so let’s go get our share.” When I realized how little had been done to maintain these buildings, I could understand their reasoning. So we had to be conscious of that and try to present the plan so that the folks would see that in the long run we could solve all the problems by establishing priorities. Generally, we had to make the case in such a way that the public would agree that whatever priority we set at number 1, they would agree that if they had that problem, they’d want that to be number 1 too. So when we established priorities, we had to have a series of meetings to explain to the publics—all the publics—why we placed this priority number 1, this priority number 2, and so forth. The idea was that we could solve each problem completely if we could spend all of the available money solving priority number 1 and then spending all the available money solving priority number 2, rather than patching up things here and there. We sold that idea. It was a hard work, but people saw our plan and supported it. And this procedure worked.

We determined that the situation in west Macon, where Prairie Farms, Shorter, and D. C. Wolfe schools were located, was the number 1 priority. Basically, there were two problems. First of all, the Prairie Farms School was literally falling down. Termites were eating it up. It was a frame building built in the late ’30s, as I recall. I don’t think we ever found any record showing it had been treated for termites. It was something to behold, a real dinosaur. The classroom was heated by potbellied stoves, and in one corner, you had a great big television set! What a sight—the past and the future there together. We went out one Saturday morning and crawled under the building. As a carpenter and former industrial arts instructor, I recognized immediately what was going on. The situation was even worse than I had nerve to convey to the public. I