[ti:Saving a School, and Its History ] [ar:Shirley Griffith] [al:Education Report] [by:www.51voa.com] [00:00.00]This is the VOA Special English [00:02.66]Education Report. [00:04.70]The Harrington School [00:06.55]is an old one-room schoolhouse [00:09.53]in the American state of Georgia. [00:12.68]The building has not been used in years. [00:16.46]Community leaders [00:18.35]and even the local historical society [00:21.68]lost hope that it could be saved. [00:24.72]AMY ROBERTS: "They said that the building [00:26.77]just wasn't worth saving, [00:27.87]and you could just look at it [00:29.51]and tell that it was going to fall any minute, [00:31.90]so let's tear it down." [00:32.84]Amy Roberts has good memories of the school. [00:36.74]She attended first grade there [00:39.64]in nineteen fifty-three. [00:41.63]That was a year before the United States [00:45.52]Supreme Court ruled that schools [00:48.36]had to be racially integrated. [00:50.50]A number of states kept blacks [00:54.04]from attending school with whites. [00:56.24]The Harrington School was built [00:59.23]in nineteen twenty-five [01:01.02]for black children on St. Simons Island. [01:05.05]After the ruling, [01:06.85]the children joined white students [01:09.30]at St. Simons' other elementary school. [01:12.39]The old schoolhouse continued [01:15.98]to be used for social activities [01:18.79]and a day care center. [01:20.73]By nineteen seventy, however, [01:23.86]it stood empty. [01:26.31]Amy Roberts worried [01:28.45]that developers might tear it down. [01:31.55]So she started the African-American [01:34.78]Heritage Coalition to try to save it. [01:38.42]AMY ROBERTS: "If it's not done, [01:39.62]if it's not saved, [01:40.91]then eventually you would not know [01:43.20]that we existed here on St. Simons. [01:45.70]Everything of African-American heritage [01:49.54]has been torn down." [01:50.99]In two thousand nine the Harrington School [01:54.78]was weeks away from destruction. [01:57.42]Then a local historian named [02:01.29]Patty Deveau took a closer look. [02:03.88]She remembered a movement [02:06.42]called the Rosenwald Fund. [02:08.91]Julius Rosenwald was a businessman. [02:13.00]In nineteen fifteen he donated money [02:17.39]to black communities [02:18.79]to build their own schools. [02:21.48]Georgia historian Jeanne Cyriaque explains. [02:26.42]JEANNE CYRIAQUE: "At the very core of that movement [02:28.87]was the involvement of the community, [02:31.80]sympathetic whites and philanthropy, [02:35.79]merging together to do [02:37.64]what today we'd call partnerships." [02:39.64]By the late twenties, [02:41.24]the Rosenwald Fund had donated to more than [02:45.57]five thousand educational buildings [02:47.76]in fifteen states across the South. [02:51.44]One-third of rural black children [02:54.98]were attending a Rosenwald school. [02:57.42]There are no records of whether Harrington [03:01.95]was a Rosenwald school. [03:03.84]But Jeanne Cyriaque says it represents [03:07.62]what the fund was trying to do. [03:10.27]JEANNE CYRIAQUE: "This particular school [03:11.96]kind of embodies to me what was going on [03:14.95]with the communities at the time, [03:16.34]because in many African-American communities, [03:19.18]it was African-American families [03:21.78]that gave land for these schools to be built." [03:25.18]Now, preservation architects are developing plans [03:29.56]to restore the Harrington School. [03:32.10]Amy Roberts and others were surprised [03:36.13]by what the experts found when they inspected the structure. [03:40.97]AMY ROBERTS: "And they went through it [03:42.71]and they talked about how sound it was and how, [03:47.00]you know, I mean, they'd never seen anything like this. [03:49.78]I mean, it was, like, in great shape!" [03:53.03]And that's the VOA Special English Education Report. [03:57.97]I'm Shirley Griffith.