CHAFFEE TO TEAR DOWN OLD HIGH SCHOOL

CHAFFEE -- The old brick high school building has stood vacant for the past five years, a deteriorating monument of memories.

Having outlived its usefulness, the more-than-70-year-old structure is scheduled to be torn down this fall. The Chaffee Board of Education last week accepted the $29,000 bid submitted by J.W. Strack Construction of Cape Girardeau for demolition of the building. School officials are now in the process of executing the contract.

"It breaks your heart when you've been through it when it was a fairly nice facility, and then you go into it now and see how it has deteriorated," said Barbara Arnold, a 1950 graduate of the school.

Arnold heads the Chaffee Alumni Association and works for the school district as secretary to the superintendent.

"It just feels like a part of you is leaving," Arnold said of the building's impending demise.

"I have a lot of fond memories there. I will probably cry when it goes down. I live right across the street."

This is Arnold's 24th year of working in the Chaffee School District. In that time, she has served as a teacher's aide and a high school secretary before assuming her current position about eight years ago.

"I was one of the bad ones, I never got out of school," she quipped.

Arnold said the front part of the old high school was built around 1919. The building was enlarged in 1922.

It was still in good shape when Arnold attended high school and dresses were required school attire. "It had real pretty hardwood floors," she recalled.

Time and disuse, however, have taken their tolls on the building. The floors have buckled.

The Chaffee Alumni Association recently sold off some of what Superintendent Wayne Pressley calls "the old stuff" from the school, such things as old textbooks and chairs. The association made about $450 from the Labor Day sale.

Arnold said there's little left to do but "shovel up all those memories and just keep them."

Pressley said the structure needs to be demolished for reasons of safety and liability.

"We know that there are a lot of memories for past graduates and alumni, but we hope they understand that it is needed," he said.

"We have a lot of people who come back and would like to go in there and visit," said Pressley, adding that school officials have turned down such requests because of the deteriorating condition of the structure.

Chaffee's new high school, situated just west of the old building, opened in 1988.

With the old school no longer needed, the district has not put money into maintaining the building, Pressley said.

Assuming the demolition contract is signed, the work should commence by mid-October and be completed by mid-January at the latest, said Pressley.

Some of the old bricks may be sold as a school district fund-raiser, he said.

Plans call for clearing and filling in the site, where new classrooms could be constructed in the future possibly under a lease-purchase plan.

But Pressley stressed there are no immediate plans to build a new school.

Still, he said, the district has an aging arts building, which houses home economics, industrial arts, instrumental and vocal music, and the Parents As Teachers program.

Pressley said there are space concerns not only at the high school but also in the elementary school. "We need to begin to reduce some of our class sizes."

The district has 320 students enrolled in grades 7-12 and 360 in kindergarten through sixth grade.