by Roseana Auten
A bittersweet, trick
ending is the literary device for which the 19th-century short story writer
William Sidney Porter, who labored under the nom de plume O. Henry, is
best known. As most Austin public school students of American literature know,
O. Henry briefly lived in a rented house at Fifth and Neches in 1893-95. An
institution assigned to their education bears his name. Its present condition
is, well, contrary to what one might expect.
O. Henry Middle School, located in tony, white, West Central Austin, is marked
by years of neglect of its facilities. It serves not just privileged children
of Tarrytown residents, but also some of the city’s neediest students — almost
40% of its enrollment is considered low-income. Busing for integration has also
rendered it more racially diverse than people expect; 51% of the student
population is white; the rest are African-American and Hispanic.
O. Henry parents argue that plans to spend $7 million to renovate and expand
the aging facility — part of an upcoming bond package of possibly $370 million
— could be just throwing good money after bad. Superintendent Jim Fox has
repeatedly said that weighing the long-term cost effectiveness of renovating
versus replacing a facility will be a major endeavor of AISD staff. Two
administrators who are assigned to study the question are set to give their
recommendation to the board on December 13. If that’s the case, say O. Henry
parents, their school should be considered a candidate for replacement — for
the sake of equity and to keep the inner core of Austin alive.
Out of 15 middle schools in AISD, only Fulmore, first built in 1911, is older
than O. Henry (and Fulmore has been renovated over the years). Built in 1953,
O. Henry was designed in one story, making the most of cross ventilation panels
and sloped ceilings to (theoretically) keep air moving in all the rooms. (Air
conditioning didn’t come to most AISD schools until the mid-to-late 1960s.)
Like so many buildings erected at that time, it also made use of a wonderfully
strong material, asbestos, and was wired to meet the technological demands of
the pre-Sputnik era.
In the years since then, asbestos has been removed, air conditioning
installed, and some additional electrical wiring stapled along corridors. But
decades of taxpayers’ recalcitrance toward issuing bonds, or raising taxes to
keep AISD facilities up-to-date, has only allowed the dinginess in every corner
of O. Henry to mushroom. For a film production company making a TV movie this
summer, the school’s “vintage” looks fit in perfectly with their story. O.
Henry parents — on both sides of I-35 — are less charmed by this fact and
claim the building impedes their children’s education. A few examples:
A full bathroom, complete with bathtub and tiled walls, once used to teach
girls how to clean house, is in the middle of a room that is used as a
bilingual education classroom. The students sit in a “U” configuration, the
bathroom blocking out the center of the “U.” They can see the teacher pretty
well , but they can’t see each other.
The French classroom has an industrial-style fire suppression hood, left over
from the days when students were taught quantity food preparation to prepare
them for jobs in hospitals. The students have made the best of the massive,
galvanized steel intrusion into their classroom, though, decorating the hood
with tricolor construction paper. (Vive la France!)
Rooms dedicated to science instruction are not conducive to meaningful lab
exercises because they either have no running water, no space for lab tables,
or inadequate power sources.
O. Henry’s award-winning orchestra teacher instructs his students in a
portable building. The band room, which features no type of acoustical
accommodations, blasts into the Spanish classroom directly across the hall.
There is no storage for musical instruments anywhere.
Locker rooms, showing every bit of their 42 years, have no storage for
athletic equipment. Boys stow their football gear directly in the showers,
which aren’t usable, anyway.
Students learn keyboarding on typewriters they’ll never encounter in the
much-vaunted real world, and service for the machines is no longer available.
Next door, the minority of O. Henry students interested in art receive
instruction in a dark cubbyhole that’s around half the size of other middle
schools’ art rooms, and has virtually nowhere to store supplies or
works-in-progress.
Next door, students take “shop” in a dimly lit, poorly ventilated, and sadly
appointed space. The din of machinery and the hot smell of sanded wood wafts
over next door to the special education classroom, which is carved out of a
space that was used as a catch-all for broken furniture and equipment. The
teacher, who instructs emotionally disturbed children, is happy to have it. She
used to teach in the room with the bathroom.
Like so many buildings erected at that time, O. Henry
also made use of a wonderfully strong material, asbestos, and was wired to
respond to the technological demands of the pre-Sputnik era.
- “Why is it that we have these conditions in a school on the Westside?” asks
Raul Rosa, an O. Henry parent from East Austin and former school board
candidate. Noting a habitual lack of attention by the city, county, and school
district to many needs of Eastside residents, he wonders whether perhaps the
school has been neglected because of its minority population — as opposed to
being neglected in spite of its white population. It’s not that O. Henry has
never gotten any attention — the passage of a 1983 bond issue provided the
school with a new wing. And it’s not as though the district has been completely
inattentive to the Eastside’s needs — two new middle schools, Kealing and
Mendez, were built in the 1980s. O. Henry parents were glad to get the
additions a decade ago, and they don’t begrudge the Eastside getting the
schools that they obviously needed. But, they say, now it’s their turn.
Principal Pam Hall thinks that many people just don’t know much about the
condition of O. Henry, and assume that as a West Austin school, it doesn’t have
problem students. “It’s not fair to send some of the neediest kids in the city
to one of the least adequate facilities,” she says. “Many people don’t see that
when they think of O. Henry.”
Although Rosa has strong reservations that any bond funds will be spent
equitably where minority and central city residents are concerned — and he’s
not yet sold on the bond proposal — he supports at least the idea of beginning
again. “O. Henry needs to be torn down and started over,” Rosa says. “It does
not support a modern curriculum and challenge the students.”
Laurie Hall is president of the O. Henry Parent-Teacher Association this year.
She herself was a junior high student there; what’s more, her father, Charles
Granger, was the original architect for the school. But she doesn’t cherish the
hope that her father’s creation can be successfully transformed to support
students in the future. She, like Rosa, is skeptical that bond funds will be
spent equitably, especially if what’s proposed in an AISD bond committee report
— an eight-classroom wing addition, and some health and safety upgrades — is
all that will happen for O. Henry. If the school isn’t replaced, she thinks,
too many people will pass on O. Henry and move out to far-flung, southwestern
subdivisions where they can send their children to very nice, new schools like
Bailey and Covington Middle Schools, and Bowie High. Those schools may be
dangerously crowded, but at least nobody has class in a bathroom, and the
football team can use the showers. In addition, new schools for relief from
over-enrollment are slated for the southwest — making the future seem bright
for the sprawling part of Austin, but less cheery for what’s already here.
“Right now, I don’t see equity in that bond package, I just don’t,” Hall says.
She points out that O. Henry is very likely not the only candidate for more
attention than the bond committee report calls for; Travis and McCallum High
Schools (both built the same year as O. Henry), and Lamar Middle School (built
in 1955) are not aging well, either. “This school district needs to be very
careful not to create a doughnut, not to have all these new schools surrounding
crummy central city schools.”
If East- and Westside parents have never before discovered a way of really
getting together on the same side, then they may hit upon one now. “I don’t
want $370 million to go to the outside when the inside is falling apart,” says
Rosa. “You can’t hug the outside of the city and hope the center feels it.”
“We cannot even attempt to go into this without taking care of the inner city
schools,” says principal Hall. “We know what kinds of facilities we have in
this district and we’re just asking, `Please give us that at O. Henry.’ Right
now at this facility, our kids are being cheated.”
WWW Extra Several images of building conditions at O. Henry school, by photographer Alan Pogue, are available:
Note: Images are in JPEG format.
This article appears in November 10 • 1995 and November 10 • 1995 (Cover).