MURFREESBORO — Even
the parties are historic at the Homer Pittard Campus School, which celebrated
its 86th year April 14 at a noisy, joyful open house with a special twist.
Fifth-graders scurried through the halls, acting as ambassadors and tour
guides for dozens of guests. A 1930 film touting the work of the facility, then
known as “The Training School,” played on a lobby screen as current and former
students, teachers, parents and employees greeted each other and other
community members.
The late-afternoon gathering featured displays honoring students from
the 1930s through today and a painstaking exhibit on the school’s first
teacher, the devoted and innovative educator Mary Ella “Miss Mary” Hall, inside
her former north wing classroom.
“The last time she was in this classroom, where she’d taught, Miss Mary
was 91 years old,” former Campus principal Dr. Rita Schaerer King said of a
1986 visit from Hall.
“She sat down at a computer and said, ‘I wish somebody had a minute to
teach me about this.’ So the children did. That was Miss Mary,” added King, who
organized this year’s open house with the Friends of Campus School and did her
dissertation at Vanderbilt University on “Mary Hall: A 20th Century Pioneer for
Educational Progress in Tennessee.”
Hall, a native of the Kittrell community in Rutherford County, was:
·
the first teacher at Campus, then known as the
Training School of Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, when it opened in 1929;
·
Tennessee's first state education supervisor in
1936;
·
MTSU’s dean of women in the 1940s; and
·
the lone female faculty member in the university’s
Department of Education for more than 20 years.
Though she retired from MTSU in 1960, Hall remained active in education and
in the community until her death in 1991. She maintained her interest in
educational opportunities for all, according to her great-nieces and
great-nephew, along with her blunt but loving guidance for everyone from her
family to her students.
“She had very strong convictions and morals. She didn’t change her
beliefs because of what others thought or how trends changed,” Angie Kleineau said
of her great-aunt, whom the family called “Me-Me,” as her siblings
— Benita Lane of Carthage, Tennessee, and Ginger Lowery and Ben Hall
McFarlin Jr. of Murfreesboro — nodded in agreement.
“She cared very passionately for children and for education. She was
calling legislators all the time to get them to do more for education.”
Indeed, Hall, who’s on the cover of the Heritage Society of Murfreesboro
and Rutherford County’s “In the Footsteps of Notable Women” self-guided tour
brochure, convinced the Tennessee Legislature in the mid-1960s to change a law
that banned using state funds for public kindergartens.
MTSU later began operating one of the state’s nine pilot kindergarten
programs at Campus School, allowing student teachers from the university to get
their training as well as providing early education for youngsters.
The siblings also laughed while recalling a story about Hall’s
unexpected visit to the MTSU dormitory that bears her name several years after
its 1964 dedication.
It wasn’t being maintained to her standards, they said, so Hall marched
into an administrator’s office and ordered him to “’fix that place up for those
girls,’ or take her name off it and shut it down,” McFarlin said with a
chuckle. “They had people over there by that afternoon.”
Campus School, which is now a K-5 facility staffed and operated by the
Rutherford County Schools but still owned by MTSU, initially served first
through eighth grades. Its last eighth grade class left in 1972, when the
county opened Riverdale and Oakland high schools and turned the former Central High
into a middle school.
More fifth-graders helped capture memories from former students and
faculty on video, encouraging the reunited visitors to share favorite stories
of their time at the school.
Siblings Bobbie Jean Parkhurst Snoddy and John Parkhurst, for instance,
had young Sam McGill and Ingram Parks struggling to stifle their laughter as
they used their iPads to record the pair’s first-grade memories from 1936 and
1946, respectively. Former Campus principal Stan Baskin kept them fascinated as
he recalled the building upgrades that helped bring the aging facility up to
more 21st-century standards in 2008 and 2009.
“The best part was seeing everybody laughing and visiting and enjoying
history,” King said as she and other volunteers packed up the open-house
necessities for another year. “It just thrilled me to see our students from the
’30s talking with the children enrolled today. They were having so much fun.”
You can learn more about the Homer Pittard Campus School’s history at
the Friends of Campus School’s website, http://friendscs.wordpress.com.
The 1930 film is available there as well as at http://vimeo.com/99635973. You also can watch a series of video interviews
with Hall archived at the “MTSU Memory” Digital Collection at http://ow.ly/LF3m3.
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