West Greene students bid farewell to elementary schools
GRAYSVILLE – The last day of class Wednesday was a “bittersweet” moment for students and teachers at two West Greene elementary schools as they closed their classroom doors for the final time.
Graysville and Springhill-Freeport elementary schools are closing as the district prepares to consolidate and move students into a new building on West Greene’s central campus next school year.
“I’m going to miss this school, and I’m really going to like my next school,” Graysville second-grader Jessie Cooke said as she wrangled her purple balloon before releasing it with her classmates outside the school.
Albie Rinehart was a teacher at Graysville when it opened in 1970 and continued teaching in the district until 2002. He returned to the school Wednesday morning and spoke at a celebratory assembly before 240 students marched outside for a balloon release to say farewell.
“I was here to greet the first kids and wave goodbye to the last ones,” Rinehart said. “It’s a special place. You end some memories here and start new ones there.”
Those new memories will move over to the new West Greene Elementary School being built at the middle-high school campus near Rogersville. The sixth-graders will also join the more than 300 current elementary students moving into the new building next school year. The district began planning to build the new elementary school in 2012.
“These two schools have been held near and dear to everybody’s heart,” West Greene Superintendent Thelma Szarell said. “It’s been a real strong home-school community connection. But everybody from the get-go has been behind building a new school. They know we need something updated that’s more cost-effective for us to better utilize our resources.”
As a teacher at Graysville for 21 years and principal for two years in the early 2000s, Szarell knows the impact of the neighborhood elementary schools had in the communities. Szarell said Springhill-Freeport, which had 70 students this year, was the “hub of the community” since it opened in 1953.
Tiffany Hart, the head teacher at Springhill-Freeport who taught kindergarten for 22 years, choked back tears as memories flowed through her mind.
“It’s like a grand finale,” Hart said. “It’s a bittersweet moment. It’ll be different moving from a smaller building where you know everyone’s name to a bigger building.”
Jessica Wassil, a first-grade teacher at Graysville for 20 years who also attended the grade school as a young girl, said she had mixed emotions as she said goodbye to her students and prepared to clean out her classroom. Her roots run deep through the elementary school as her mother, Rosemary Andrew, also taught there for more than 20 years and her grandmother, Virginia Guthrie, was a teacher in the district for decades.
“I’m tearing up thinking of everything that has happened here,” Wassil said. “Everything will be brand new with new routines.”
The teachers and administrators agree the new campus ultimately will help the students and save the district money.
However, Hart emphasized the importance of a small school in a rural area.
“It holds the community together. It’s a gathering place for a lot of people and it’s been a positive one,” she said. “There are also a lot of people who are sad to see the doors close. There was a lot of learning and a lot of fun going on.
“It will continue, but it will be different.”