Hathorn School
Closure Issue
More
than money’s at stake in proposed Hathorn closure
With photos/for use Wednesday, Feb. 8, 2006
By SUSIE JAMES
For the Commonwealth
VAIDEN -- Here’s an idea: if consolidating the county’s elementary schools
must take place, let’s move all the students to the campus of
Hathorn Elementary’s
principal, Shirley Lester, said this isn’t what she is recommending in the face
of recent dialogue during school board meetings about axing Hathorn
with its current 141 students in favor of consolidation at Marshall Elementary
in
“What we -- my staff and I -- are asking is that the district leave both schools as they are,” Lester said during an interview earlier this week.
The school board, meeting at 6 p.m. Thursday at the Vaiden Courthouse, is
taking a closer look at the district’s financial condition -- a situation that
led Smith Sparks, a financial consultant from Clinton who late last year told
the board the district couldn’t afford to keep Hathorn
open. In January, District 2 board member Marcus Kuykendall said the board
might as well adopt
A flier publicly posted around the county last week suggests that if in fact
Lester said the push to sacrifice the county’s only Level 4 school is unbelievably short-sighted. “There’s more at stake here than money,” she said. “When Vaiden High was consolidated with J. Z. George, it was different. What’s being suggested by closing Hathorn doesn’t include any beneficial new programs. It seems only the idea is to penalize Hathorn for being Level 4. In fact, last time, we were .04 away from attaining Level 5.”
Both George and
A bulletin board in the hallway near the office door at Hathorn is packed with snapshots of students from Hathorn who enjoyed a field trip in October to Triple N Ranch to celebrate Hathorn’s for the third year in a row attaining Level 4 status.
“We haven’t really documented what our 141 will do,” Lester said, “because late last summer, when the rating came out again, that rating was based on what was accomplished the preceding year, when Hathorn had 165 students. The year before that, Hathorn had 173.”
Lester says she’s confident, however, that if the Hathorn student population were to swell dramatically, she and her staff would continue their path of excellence toward Level 5.
Willie Thomas, Jr., 59, who currently runs his own restaurant in Vaiden,
retired from the
Thomas taught at Marshall Elementary and then from 1984-1996 was Hathorn’s principal, replacing Percy Hathorn.
Thomas agrees it would be a terrific blow to the community, for one thing, should Vaiden lose its sole remaining school.
“We do need more students,” Thomas said. The remedy lies, he says in
transportation. “Re-route 40-50 students from
While this action would not address the costs associated with maintaining two separate campuses, administrators, and other staff, Thomas said, this would be fair. “At Hathorn, we can, was always our motto,” Thomas said, “all the parents, teachers, and students believed this.”
Lester said the old brick shop building to the extreme south of the main Hathorn School building that later became the Title I structure and by last year housed kindergartners, was closed after the Christmas holidays as a cost-cutting measure suggested and enacted with Ferguson’s approval. Hathorn also lost four staff members after Jan. 31 in the district’s further measures to try and slice the budget.
Vaiden Mayor George Turbeville will be among those speaking up Thursday night to try and save Hathorn. In a special meeting Jan. 16, Vaiden Aldermen adopted a resolution supporting the fight for Hathorn.
In part, the resolution sponsored by Alderman Frances “Bud” Welch and
seconded by Alderman Lemon Cunningham says, “Be it hereby resolved that the
Town of
Turbeville, speaking Monday, said, “It’s not fair for y’all to take away all of our schools.”
*************
Carroll
meeting is giant Hathorn pep rally
With photos/for use Friday, Feb. 10, 2006
By SUSIE JAMES
For the Commonwealth
VAIDEN -- In the final analysis Thursday night, the Carroll County School Board couldn’t agree to table talk of closing Level 4 Hathorn Elementary School here indefinitely. They met without the promised gloom and doom presentation by Smith Sparks, the financial consultant who late last year told the school board they couldn’t afford to keep the 141-student facility open, however.
Meeting at the Vaiden Courthouse, members faced a courtroom literally
stuffed with people, a goodly portion of them carrying signs and placards
begging for the life of the only school left in southern
Chairman Laura N. Davis and District 5 member Rubye Miller voted to table the issue of closure indefinitely. They were outvoted by District 1 member Kenneth DeLoach, District 2 member Marcus Kuykendall, and District 3 member Mike O’Neal.
Superintendent of Education Billy Joe Ferguson said a new report from the
State Department of Education should be studied and a deeper study into the
entire school system’s workings the district has asked
A couple of hecklers briefly disrupted the meeting. One man, whom both Vaiden Police Chief Terry Andrews and District Security Officer Claude Foreman, who escorted him out of the courthouse would not identify, first said a couple of times nobody could hear what anyone at the board table was saying. He later interrupted Kuykendall when Kuykendall rose from his chair and began speaking. At this point, he left, assisted by officers, who later would only say the man “was a little intoxicated.” He was not, both Foreman and Andrews said, taken into custody.
A seated woman said loudly that
Kuykendall said to the hundreds, “You’re here because you are concerned about the attendance center your child attends.” They should be, Kuykendall said, concerned about the pass-fail rate there. He said one out of four children in 3rd grade at the Level 4 school is failing. Nobody disputed his statistics.
He said, “Get involved with your child, regardless of where he goes to school … the principal, teacher, superintendent can’t do it all … give him some hard love and teach him the discipline to study.”
Vaiden Alderman Grace Voorhees said, “We need to levy more mills (currently the county levies 26.9 for district maintenance) and channel education dollars properly. It’s time to work together.”
Veteran civil rights activist Leola Blackmon, now frail at 80, said it seems
to her there’s been far too much “going backwards” in the past 40 years. She
said it was a “big mistake” to close
“In the day,” as the saying goes, Blackmon was a housewife and farm laborer when she fought for equal school terms for black children, lying down in front of a school bus at the now vanished Black Hawk school and getting hauled off to jail.
She recalled when prayer was taken out of classrooms. She said she told her children they might not legally be able to pray within -- but they’d better never enter the school doors without first praying. Her children, who have done well in life, Blackmon said, obeyed her.
Several Hathorn Elementary students pleaded eloquently for their school. One mentioned the clean bathrooms; another, the quiet environment; others, the continuity of teachers, students, and family that is Hathorn and has been since 1956, when the brick facility was built.
Jackie McKinney, a former Army careerist, an educator, and one-time political candidate, said all the poor-mouthing going on about affordability of schools comes down to one thing. It’s private school versus public schools, she said. There’s not enough money, she said, to run both private and public schools.”
Several people said if the county is to have but one public elementary
school, Marshall Elementary, with its 390 students and contained on 3 acres,
surrounded by a neighborhood that has been often referred to as crime-ridden
and seamy, is the one that should be closed, not Hathorn.
After the emotional meeting,
Kuykendall said he wanted to make clear that the current crisis was brought on when the board “had to look at Hathorn to be able to continue to operate … this has caused the administration to look at other places to cut costs to try and save Hathorn. … They have got to come up with more cost effective measures.”
Following the meeting,
