Celebrating 70 years of schooling at Lawn
On Sunday, Sept. 18, 1955, more than 1,000 people toured the brand-new Jamestown School building on Lawn Avenue.
That evening Michael Walsh, commissioner of education for Rhode Island, officially dedicated the new facility.
Getting support and money for the school had not been easy. Jamestown already had two schools. The Carr School on Clarke Street, where McQuade’s is now, had been built in 1897; an addition was added in 1914.
When Carr proved too small for the expanding population, the Clarke Middle School for grades 5-8 was opened in 1923 on the site of the present library. Each school could house one class per grade or approximately 275 students.
As early as 1943, the elementary and middle school students in Jamestown numbered 293. (High school students always were sent off island.) The Second World War, which for the United States began with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December 1941 and ended with the defeat of Germany and Japan in the summer of 1945, initiated a nationwide baby boom.
At the 1948 financial town meeting, Fred Clarke, the school committee’s chairman, and Anthony Miller, superintendent of schools, brought the issue to the attention of the voters. They displayed a graph showing the anticipated increase in enrollment for the next 10-year period. It was estimated the peak would be reached in 1953. The trend called for two additional first-grade teachers immediately and similar increases as the students matured and new children came of school age. They asked the town to address the pending problem immediately.
As the struggle to house classes became more acute, halfway measures were introduced. The Grange Hall was leased and partitioned into classrooms; double sessions were introduced with some students attending school in the morning and others in the afternoon with the same teacher leading both sessions. Parents complained. At the financial town meeting in 1951, a proposal was presented to allot $37,200 for school planning.
Unexpected support for the proposal came from a picket parade of children in front of the recreation center carrying banners asking for better school facilities. After a spirited debate, the proposal passed 372-264.
Almost immediately, the school committee authorized architects to draw plans for a new school and quickly approved preliminary plans for a 20-room building on the town-owned 21-acre lot bounded by Watson, Melrose, Arnold and Lawn avenues. Construction costs were estimated at $690,000. In March, enabling legislation for a bond to pay for construction was passed in the General Assembly.
Voters balked at the price, despite the announcement in September that the size of the incoming 1952 kindergarten class was 50 percent larger than the 1951 class. Negotiations and compromise followed. The gymnasium was eliminated from the plan, reducing the proposed cost to $525,000.
There was a special election to approve a bond for that amount in January 1953; it was defeated 410-292. Thomas Hunt, chairman of the school board at the time, was quoted as saying, “We will have to start all over again and seek another enabling act in the legislature. Perhaps we will have more double sessions. No matter how you look at it, it is going to be costly.”
In March, the General Assembly passed the necessary enabling legislation, and a construction bond for $350,000 was approved 405-261 at the financial town meeting in May. The revised plan showed 12 classrooms to accommodate kindergarten through fourth grade, a health clinic, a library and an all-purpose room. To reduce costs, rooms for grades 5-8 and an auditorium were removed. The construction was estimated to cost $348,000.
Ground for the new school was broken Dec. 30, 1953, and construction began in spring 1954. That July, the school building commission approved general specifications for four additional classrooms, although the contract to build the addition wasn’t awarded until May 1955 by which time the original construction was basically complete.
The additional rooms increased the cost of building by $60,000 but allowed both Carr and Clarke to be closed, effectively reducing maintenance costs and freeing the land for sale by the town.
On Monday, Sept. 19, 1955, 400 students — kindergarten through eighth grade — started classes in the new facility.
