Thursday, August 17, 2006

2765 Was your high school deactivated?

Illinois has a Glory Days website for deactivated high schools. It is an interesting site and they are looking for stories and photos and records for a lot of schools. Mine seems pretty complete, since it only submerged in the 1990s. I checked my mother's school, which deactivated in the 1950s and it seems a little sparse. I'll have to dig around in my old photos and see what I can come up with.

It's very sad when a town loses its school system. It's hard to make it as a community without that unifying effort of educating for the future. Mt. Morris lost its schools from greed, disaster and duplicity. There was a strike in its major industry, printing, about 30 years ago which spelled economic disaster for the formerly proud and prosperous town, then the bond issues didn't pass, then after they started bussing the high school kids to the next town, the grade school burned to the ground in 2004. Instead of rebuilding as the town wanted, the local rep on the school board back-stabbed his constituency and voted not to rebuild. He's since moved out of state, which was probably smart.

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