WHITINGHAM- For Whitingham residents, this past Sunday marked more than just another excuse to exchange candy hearts printed with snappy sayings.

February 14 also marked the 50th anniversary of the completion of the Whitingham School, an institution that changed the lives of children in the town and continues to serve as a source of community pride five decades later.

Whitingham’s struggle to build a school may sound familiar to the current Twin Valley facility committee. A program printed for the big day includes a brief history of the process, which began more than a decade earlier, in 1949. That was the year that the Whitingham School Board began to look for an alternative to their inadequate and overcrowded collection of small village schools. The first school committee considered the construction of a middle/high school for grades eight through 12, but the idea wasn’t considered feasible. Several more committees were appointed, and other ideas proposed. One proposal was taken as far as a special Town Meeting, but voters turned it down. Another committee proposed adding on to the existing high school in Jacksonville.

Even then, there was discussion about consolidation with Wilmington. Some residents wanted the two towns to share in the funding and construction of the school. But in the mid-1950s, Wilmington was planning their own school project – an addition to their (then) 55-year-old central school.

Finally, another committee proposed a school that would serve Whitingham students in grades one through 12. In 1955, Whitingham voters created a reserve fund and, in 1958, voted to build the school and purchase the land on which it would be built.

With the help of an architect from Princeton, MA, the committee chose a “Maximlite” school design.

The Maximlite design was touted as having “construction costs out of the 1930s” when it was introduced by Fayetteville, Arkansas-based architect T. Ewing Shelton in the 1950s. Maximlite buildings were steel-framed, flat-roofed (Whitingham School’s pitched roofs were added in the 1980s) buildings with concrete floors and concrete block partition walls.

One of the features of the design touted by the committee was the use of glass blocks in the exterior walls. The glass blocks are directional and direct sunlight up to the ceiling, “which gives pupils the advantages of natural lighting without the glare.” The 44,850-square-foot building was also said to be “nearly fireproof.”

At the time of its completion, Whitingham School was the most modern facility in the Deerfield Valley, and offered Whitingham students advantages that students in other towns didn’t have. No other school in the valley boasted a gymnasium, a cafeteria, a full commercial kitchen, or a fully-outfitted shop classroom.

Before Whitingham School was built, students were scattered around several schools in town, and the classrooms were crunched. The high school was located in Jacksonville, in what’s now the town’s municipal center. Elementary school students from Whitingham attended a three-room schoolhouse in the village. The former school is now an apartment building known as the Schoolhouse Apartments.

Former student Sherry Adams recalls how crowded the school was in 1959, when she was a sixth-grader. “There were three classes in each of the three big classrooms, with one teacher,” Adams says.

Adams’ grandmother was the school cook, preparing lunches in a tiny kitchen.

A few weeks into the school year, the classes were split up and sent to various buildings throughout the town, where students from Whitingham and Jacksonville combined for the first time. Adams went to a small one-room schoolhouse that hadn’t been used in years.

The plan, Adams speculates, was to give students some time to get used to their new classmates before the new school opened. “That was the first time most of us met the kids from Jacksonville,” she says.

In December, the combined Jacksonville and Whitingham classes moved out of their rustic temporary classrooms, and into the new school. Adams says students entered the building in awe. “We were excited, but a little scared,” she says. “We were walking into an unknown.”

The new school was a significant change in the lives of Whitingham students. “It opened up a new world to us,” Adams says. “We were going to school in a room with two other classes sharing the same teacher. We didn’t have any extras, we didn’t have physical education. Then, all of a sudden, we were in this big building, and we had all these new things like a nurse’s office, and physical education. I don’t think any of us had ever seen a gymnasium before – it opened up sports to us. It was just great.”

On February 14, 1960, the school held an official grand opening ceremony. The architect and builder officially presented the building to school board members. Superintendent A. Weldon House, and the school’s first principal, Rolland Lafayette, offered their thoughts on the occasion. The Whitingham School band and glee club entertained. Education officials from around the state were on hand to witness the event.

Although they had moved out of the old high school in Jacksonville two months earlier, students made a symbolic march from the old school up to the new school. Student council president Jane Bosley, who is now school nurse Jane Boyd, had the honor of riding to the ceremony in a car with Wendell Morse, to raise the flag for the first time. Morse was a member of the school board, chair of the building committee, and master of ceremonies for the day’s activities. Boyd says she had reservations about raising the flag with Morse because she was a tuition student from Readsboro – not a Whitingham resident.

Jane Boyd’s son Seth Boyd, also a Whitingham High School graduate, is chair of the Whitingham School Board. He says the pride Whitingham residents felt for their school in 1960 hasn’t waned over the last 50 years. Built at a price of $710,851 ($5,152,156 in today’s dollars), the construction of such a modern facility in a small rural community meant a great sacrifice by taxpayers, and represented an optimistic investment in the future.

Adams says the new school also brought Jacksonville and Whitingham children closer together. “The same as the collaboration with Whitingham and Wilmington has,” she notes. The school also gave the town a focal point that it hadn’t had before. “Whitingham is a lot of houses and the school,” Adams explains. “There was really nothing else in town except for the school. It’s where everyone meets. It’s the center of the town, and it has been since it was built.”