Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 21, 1995 TAG: 9505220056
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
It's the bottom of the eighth, and the Stonewall Jackson Middle School junior varsity baseball sluggers are about to beat the Woodrow Wilson Presidents from Raleigh Court.
On the hillside at Jackson Park in Southeast Roanoke, however, Jackson's parents and kids debate an imminent loss: The city school administration wants to tear down Jackson School, built in 1923 and 1928. They'd replace it with a modern building.
Bobby "B.J." Moore, 14, is all for it, even if his dad did go there. "I think they need to rip that baby on down," he says. Water stinks up the library whenever it rains, he informs the grown-ups.
Besides that, the place is old-fashioned and can't electrically handle all the computers the kids need. "That school just ain't advanced enough," he asserts.
Debbie Akers hates to hear this. She went to Jackson in the 1970s. Wednesday evening, she's sitting across from it in the park. Stretched out on her aluminum lounge chair, wiggling her bare toes and tossing back her long red ponytail, she's there to cheer on her son, Josh Tiller, and the rest of the Jackson Chargers.
She wants the school fixed up, but not torn down.
With its big multipane wooden windows and diamond-patterned brickwork, Jackson is a proud symbol to the hard-working people of Southeast. "To me, it's historical," says Akers, 36. "That means a lot, I mean for the community."
Adam Taylor, 12, runs up the grassy bank and delivers his two-cents' worth about the school. "It really don't need nothing done to it, except some painting," he says before running back to the field and slamming in a homer.
Then Akers' eighth-grader, Josh, the game's winning pitcher, slumps to a stop near his mother's feet.
"Tear the school down," he says.
"What? That's not my son," Akers jokes.
"Mama, listen," Josh pleads, laying his palms down on her plastic chair. He tells her about the step-up into the old school bathrooms - a step that bars people in wheelchairs.
"They need to make it so handicapped can go there, too," Josh says. "They're tearing it down so they can have more up-to-date technology."
Akers agrees there needs to be handicapped accessibility, central air conditioning and new flooring.
But to Akers and many other people in Southeast, demolition is a slap in the face. They think Southeast has gotten short shrift from the city for too long, and knocking down Jackson is the latest and greatest indignity.
In the tear-down-and-rebuild camp, however, are parents who didn't go to Jackson and have no attachment to the building, alumni who believe it's cheaper to rebuild, and students who want to wipe out what they say is Southeast's backward reputation.
"When you go to Jackson, you're looked down at," said Nicole Brabham, an eighth-grader.
"The people of Southeast were the best people of Roanoke," said Bob Zimmerman, owner of Roanoke Electric Zupply and an opponent of demolition. "The people of Southeast worked hard for a living, they paid their bills and they didn't bother anybody." They worked for the railroad or the American Viscose rayon factory.
But in recent years, said Zimmerman, a Jackson alumnus and father and grandfather of Jackson students, "We have just been neglected." There's nobody on City Council anymore, he says, "who digs their toes in and says, 'We're going to fight for Southeast.'"
Natives say placement of the city's sewage treatment plant there is the most obvious example of the section's being "dumped on," and they note the increasing number of low-income housing units. Zimmerman, a Southeast resident for 60 years, says the ranks of transients are on the rise.
Years ago, Southeast lost two old elementary schools - Jamison and Belmont. People want to know why Jackson can't be saved and renovated the same way other sections' old elementary schools have been in the past few years - Crystal Spring in South Roanoke, Highland Park in Old Southwest, Virginia Heights in Raleigh Court and Forest Park in Northwest.
One of the differences, says project architect Craig Sharp, is that Jackson is a middle school - with greater requirements for laboratory and technical spaces than an elementary school. Clusterings of classrooms are proposed for the new school, and there's not enough space for those in much of the old building.
The save-Jackson movement sprang up just weeks ago, when alumni saw a newspaper story and realized for the first time the school was slated to come down.
Parents were in on meetings as early as November, Sharp says, and no one objected to razing the school, which he said was clearly described in papers distributed there. "We made a serious attempt to let everybody know what we were going to do with that building."
But some in those meetings didn't understand, said Lisa Updike, a Jackson alumna. They assumed that the Jackson building would be preserved just as other neighborhoods' schools have been.
Pam Meador, whose grandparents, parents and children went to Jackson, said that on Monday afternoon demolition opponents will give City Council more than 500 petition signatures asking them to rethink Jackson's razing. A Texas couple came in early for a visit with their children so they could sign the petition, and other alumni have come from far and wide to rally behind the school.
"We feel just like Southwest does and Gainsboro does - Why take out our landmarks? We're still considered the wrong side of the tracks," Meador said.
Jackson is one of the area's largest "consolidated" schools, built around the 1920s to take children previously educated in one- and two-room schoolhouses. "There were probably 400 or 500 others like it across the state," said Leslie Giles, an architectural historian for the state Department of Historic Resources. She doesn't know how many like it are left.
Giles can see the school from her office window in Southeast. "It's a major part of the community here." She said no one called her office about tearing it down.
Sharp said it is possible to save the building, but that never was an issue. Building planners focused on designing the best and safest educational spaces, not on preserving the structure.
The save-Jackson people grew more incensed this past week when Assistant School Superintendent Richard Kelley was quoted in the newspaper as saying Jackson has the highest dropout rate among the city's middle schools and that 60 percent of Jackson students receive free lunches.
"'If the kids are poor, they are stupid,' is how it came off," said Meador. She noted that Jackson's Odyssey of the Mind team performed well in a recent world competition.
Jackson Principal Charles Kennedy is the man in the middle of all this. He went to Jackson. So did his mother. He figures about 15,000 people have gone to the school over the last 72 years.
On a short tour of the building, he noted with pride the wide hallways, the high ceilings, the transom windows above each classroom door. Some features, like the granite steps and the cornerstone, will be incorporated in the new building.
As the May breeze flowed through open classroom windows, Kennedy said, "It's hard to be objective about this, but I have to." His job is to focus on how the school can best serve its students.
He showed how the building has been wired and rewired so many times that electrical conduits and security systems overlap on hallway walls. Computer cords lie coiled under desks because rooms aren't equipped for computers.
Floor tiles buckle atop old wooden floors and in two classrooms, teachers sit over the worst humps so students won't trip over them. Paint won't stick to the walls any longer. Every piece of the building has been retrofitted so many times that Kennedy is eager for improvements, in whatever form they come.
"It's an architect's nightmare. It's been added on to haphazardly," said Dale Allen, a Jackson alumnus and member of the Southeast Action Forum Inc., a leading neighborhood organization whose president favors building a new school.
Bob Zimmerman said all he wants is for school administrators to pause long enough to check out the possibilities for saving the building.
"If we're wrong, we'll back off," he said. "But if they're wrong, we want them to back off."
The school system and the Southeast Action Forum will hold a joint meeting on Jackson school plans Monday at 6:30 p.m. at the old fire station on Jamison Avenue. The school system also will hold meetings at Garden City, 2:15 p.m. Tuesday; Fallon Park, 6:30 p.m., May 30; and Morningside, 6:30 p.m., May 31.
by CNB