For four years, white students attended a temporary elementary school at Southeastern Shipyard. The shipyard, of course, closed at the end of World War II, yet in 1949 the Board of Education leased half of the administration building on the site for use as an elementary school. War babies were reaching school age and the Board of Education was hard pressed to provide classrooms for them. Southeastern School, a stopgap solution, extended its lease until a new eastside elementary school was built in 1953. To the relief of students, parents, and teachers, Eli Whitney School in the Pine Gardens neighborhood accommodated the war babies and the first crest of the “baby boom” generation.
During its heyday in the 1950s, Whitney added more classrooms to provide for the growing number of students. The school also embraced exceptional children as part of its mission, providing the first facilities in the public schools for physically handicapped youngsters. By the 1960s, the focus shifted from physically to mentally challenged students.
In 1995, Whitney found itself in the limelight as a result of the Powell-Duffryn explosion. Spring vacation had already closed the school when the nearby tank farm detonated on April 10. The Board of Education ordered all students bussed to East Broad Elementary School when classes resumed so that Whitney could be thoroughly cleaned of any possible contamination. That solution was unworkable because of overcrowding. Instead all 543 Whitney students attended class at the old airport terminal on Dean Forest Road. Students and teachers embraced the novelty of the situation and called their makeshift school “Air Whitney.”
With the desegregation of the public schools in 1971, enrollment at Whitney fell by 10 percent and continued to decline for the next twenty years. Although the Board of Education invested more than two million dollars in the school in the 1990s, Whitney still needed extensive repairs. There was also continuing concern about the school’s proximity to possible industrial hazards, especially after the Powell-Duffryn fire. After considering these factors, the Board decided in 2003 to close Whitney. More than one hundred alumni gathered at the school in May 2003 for a reunion and a last good-bye to Eli Whitney School.
Classroom photo
Courtesy of Cathie VanWechel.
Forty-five or even fifty students jammed classrooms at Southeastern School. At Whitney in 1953, class size was reduced to thirty or thirty-five. The modern lines of the one-story brick building appealed to Americans belief in progress in the 1950s.
Classroom photo
Courtesy of Daisy Riner Harrison.
This seventh grade class was special in being the first such class at Eli Whitney School in 1953 but also one of the last. Within a few years, the seventh grade was assigned to junior high schools.
Class photo
Courtesy of Daisy Riner Harrison.
By 1980, class size at Eli Whitney had decreased markedly as enrollment declined. Mrs. Le Valle’s third-graders gathered on a spring day for their class photograph.
