ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, October 3, 1996 TAG: 9610030084
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: N-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JOEL TURNER STAFF WRITER
When Amy Cooper went back to Breckinridge Middle School last June, she got to see the secret vault she was never allowed to enter when she was a student there.
The vault, where important school papers and records were kept, was off to the side of the principal's office. It was off-limits to students.
"There were some places we could never go when I was going to school there, but they let me see everything," Cooper said.
She went into the classrooms, halls, cafeteria, library, offices, gymnasium - everywhere except the furnace room. She walked around the outside of the building, climbed the steps and strolled down the scenic front driveway.
Cooper recorded everything on video, so she has a complete visual record of the building and school grounds. The tapes run almost three hours.
"We filmed everything inside and outside," she said. "We went all around the perimeter of the building."
Cooper and her boyfriend, Steve Brusati, also took two rolls of film of the school - getting pictures of lockers, classrooms, doors, blackboards and other scenes in the building.
They visited the school a few days before most of the building was razed for a $6 million reconstruction project. Only the historic front facade and the gymnasium were left standing.
Cooper, 27, said she made the video and took the photographs because Breckinridge means so much to her. She said she wanted to preserve the memories of her years there.
"I wanted to get all of the memories before they were gone," she said.
Cooper attended the school from 1982 to 1985 when it was a junior high and housed the seventh, eighth and ninth grades.
"It was the happiest time of my life," she said. "There was a special spirit at the school. Everyone was friends and so close."
She had been back to the school a couple of times since she left to enter high school. But those visits didn't touch her emotionally, she said, because there was no plan then to raze the building.
When Cooper went back in June, she said, it was different. She knew most of the building would be gone in a few days. She went back to say goodbye.
She said her feelings are best expressed in a poem written by a classmate, Veronica Christian, when they graduated from Breckinridge.
In part, the poem reads: "A sweet goodbye to the halls below and above/A goodbye to the walls that hold our love/Goodbye Breckinridge/Goodbye my friend/For you taught me to hold my head high."
Cooper said she has special memories of the music room at the school because she was in the band and orchestra. "I loved that room."
Cooper said she felt briefly like she was back in junior high when she went back to tour the school.
She said her Breckinridge teachers helped to inspire her to want to become a teacher. She is attending Virginia Western Community College and hopes to become an elementary or middle school teacher in Roanoke.
"I wish they could have saved the school, but the principalHelen Townsend] said it had gotten to the point that it couldn't be repaired," Cooper said. "The former students didn't want to see it go."
Cooper was attending Breckinridge when it won an Excellence in Education Award from the U.S. Department of Education.
She has saved all of her yearbooks, academic and attendance certificates, photographs, graduation program and other memorabilia from her years at the school.
Cooper was president of the ninth grade in her final year at Breckinridge. She was also a majorette, cheerleader, library worker, library volunteer and participated in other extracurricular activities.
Breckinridge was built in the 1930s, and was William Fleming High School until the early 1960s. Thousands of Roanoke Valley residents are graduates of the school.
Cooper said she will provide copies of her videotapes to former Fleming and Breckinridge students and others who will pay the reproduction costs. She said she can be contacted at P.O. Box 911, Vinton, Va., 24179-0911.
"A lot of people who went to school there live out of town and didn't know about the reunion they held before the building was torn down," she said.
"The video would bring back memories to them," she said. "I want the spirit of the school to live on."
Cooper said she missed the May reunion, too, because she didn't know about it.
She said her church leaders and others, including former Mayor Noel Taylor, also helped inspire her to want to become a teacher. She served on the city's Youth Advisory Committee for several years and received a key to the city from Taylor for her work in youth programs.
"So many people have helped me," she said. "I see children struggling in schools - and teachers not always helping them - and I want to be able to help them."
But the Breckinridge teachers were not like that, she said. "Every teacher there was there to help the children, and not for the money."
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ROGER HART/Staff. Amy Cooper, holding an original brickby CNBto be used in reconstruction, videotaped the inside and outside of
Breckinridge Middle
School. color.