I walked in the front door the first day of first grade. Twelve years later, I walked out that same front door as a high school graduate. I passed through the front door of Clement School probably well over a thousand times during those 12 years. You see, in that one building was my elementary school, my junior high school, and my senior high school.
And that one building prepared me well for the years that have followed. Actually, it was the teachers and the administration that worked at Clement that prepared me. It started with Ms. Margaret Hawley, my first grade teacher, and went all the way through high school, with teachers guiding me throughout those years.
Clement School was a small school. I think there were only around 40 students in my senior class. (You couldn’t be big if you had all 12 grades in one building! Well, we did eventually get a few mobile classrooms.) The elementary grades were at the front of the school house, (Yes, we called it the “school house” back then) and the high school classes were in the rear of the building. Our gym looked like an old barn, and it was called that by folks from other schools. The gym was so small that the basketball floor was not regulation size, being a few feet narrower in length and width. Why? I don’t know. It may have been all they could afford when it was built. But it did give us often a true home court advantage, and other schools, like Midway, didn’t want to come and play at our gym.
Most of the teachers stayed at Clement until they retired, so there wasn’t much turnover. So, over the years, you got to know the teachers, and the teachers got to know you. This could be good or bad, depending on how you behaved as a student. Most of the teachers already knew that I tended to talk and cut up a little too much before I ever walked into their classroom.
I thought about those days at Clement School when I visited the school recently for a program. The Clement School I knew is long gone, having been replaced several years ago by a new building. As a matter of fact, the bricks from the demolition were dumped in a pit down on our farm and then covered with dirt. Clement is now just an elementary school, with the older students now going to Midway Middle and High School. (Who would have thought back then that kids from Clement would eventually end up at Midway and become, it’s hard to say it, “Raiders!”)
You would think coming from such a small school without many of the extras that larger schools had would be a disadvantage, when leaving there and going on to higher education. There may have been some difficulties, but when it came to the basics, I was more than prepared for college. The truth is most of the difficulties I had transitioning to college were my fault, because I hadn’t really applied myself back in high school.
But more important than preparing for college, I learned at Clement the lessons that would be much more valuable later in life than anything that was taught from a book. Values, such as persistence, caring for one another, community, and, yes, even faith in God, were taught back in that old building. (Remember, this was 50 years ago.) More important, those values were exhibited day in and day out by the teachers and staff, as an example to us students.
Old Clement School is now long gone, but the lessons learned, particularly the life lessons, carry on to this day. But today is another day, and students now face a much different world than I encountered after graduation many years ago. And we owe to them, and to their future, to prepare them in the best way possible. Old Clement School values are still essential, but much more is needed. Artificial Intelligence is coming fast, and is going to disrupt in ways we can’t imagine at the present. If today’s students are not prepared, it won’t be just their futures that will be in jeopardy, it could also be ours.