Springfield residents gather to mark final days of Park Street School

Hundreds gathered at Park Street School to say farewell to a building that has educated generations of Springfield residents. The last class will graduate Wednesday and the final bell will ring Thursday.

http://www.rutlandherald.com/article/20100615/NEWS01/706159952/1003/NEWS02

Published June 15, 2010 in the Rutland Herald

Springfield residents gather to mark final days of Park Street School

By JOSH O’GORMAN
STAFF WRITER

SPRINGFIELD — It is through the eyes of children that one can best see the passage of time.

Hundreds gathered at Park Street School to say farewell to a building that has educated generations of Springfield residents. For more than a century, the school drew together children of every grade level, and Monday night, the place so many longtime residents refer to simply as “the school” got the send off it deserves.

The last class will graduate Wednesday and the final bell will ring Thursday, but the closing has been a long time coming, and teacher Alyson Bull decided to use this final school year to give her fourth grade class — and the community — something to remember.

Lastsummer,Bulltookaseminaronplace-basededucation:takingaprobleminthecommunityandconnectingittothecurriculum.

“It thought, ‘We have a problem here. Our school’s closing,’” Bull said. “We need commemorate it somehow.”

Last fall, her pupils began planning a video history of the school. Using old photos and interviews with dozens of past students and teachers, Bull’s class fashioned a documentary that would make Ken Burns proud.

The crowd, composed of people old enough to have attended Park Street when it operated as a high school up until 1968, as well elementary age pupils attending now, roared with laughter and at times gasped in shock as alums recounted their school days during the 53-minute film.

Ninety-one-year-old Harland Whitcomb, who attended the school for his entire 12 years from 1925 to 1937, recalled how the Central School was moved with horses to be next to Park Street. Franklin Poole, class of 1951, recounted the fire that damaged the building Nov. 9, 1944.

“I saw them throw the organ out the four-story window,” Poole said. “I didn’t much care about the burning building but I was upset about that organ.”

The documentary also contained interviews with past pupils who attended after 1969, when the current high school opened and Park Street became an elementary school. But regardless of the age, anyone who attended the school recalled the long walk up the hill, including current Park Street second-grade teacher Alison Sylvester, who discussed her circuitous route to and from school.

“So, I actually walked uphill both ways,” she concluded.

Older alums discussed the differences in disciplinary practices, past and present.

“Oh, we would get paddled if we were bad,” said Florence Lindgren, class of 1942. Other students recounted being struck with a metal-edged ruler, a story that drew gasps from some of the younger members of the audience.

At the conclusion of the film, several of the interview subjects who were in the audience expressed their pleasure with the final project.

“I think it was tremendous. The kids did a wonderful job,” Whitcomb said.

“I’m sad it’s closing,” said Judy Bastille, who graduated from Park Street in 1965 and has been a reading instructional assistant there for 25 years. “I have so many memories here.”

Bull hopes the film will serve as capsule for all of those memories for Bastille, and the thousands of others who graduated from here during the last 115 years.

“I hope this project serves as a commemoration of the school building, and a way to let people start to move on, heal, and walk toward the future,” Bull said. “This is a way for our memories to stay alive.”

Copies of the film are available through SAPA-TV for $15.