STUDENTS WORK TO PRESERVE HISTORY

Oak Ridge instructor Rahe Wise prepares her EXCELS students for a view of video footage the group shot several weeks ago.

A group of Oak Ridge students are doing their best to preserve a non-renewable resource -- history.

Students in the EXCELS gifted program for grades seven through 12 at Oak Ridge High School are piecing together the history of the Oak Ridge School District by videotaping visits to a few of the 13 one-room schoolhouses which combined during the 1950s to form the district. The students are also interviewing past students, administrators, maintenance workers and others associated with the schools.

The result, says gifted program facilitator Rahe Wise, will be a documentary-style study on videotape giving students, parents, faculty members and others insight into what it was like to go to school or to teach in one of the area's one-room schoolhouses. Viewers will also learn something of how the current Oak Ridge district came to be.

"There's just a lot of history in our district but we're losing a lot of the people who we can go back and talk to," said Wise.

Although there were many one-room schoolhouse in Cape Girardeau County, Wise and her students decided to focus their study on the 13 one-room schools which consolidated in June of 1953 to become the Oak Ridge District. Those original 13 were Critesville, Concord, Buckeye, Daisy, Fulbright, Hildebrand, Arnsberg, Goshen, Oak Ridge, Horrell, Liberty, Apple Creek Valley and Appleton.

The 13 members of the gifted program were recently found reviewing footage of a pre-Christmas break visit to the Concord School, which was the segregated school for blacks and was originally located in the Liberty School District.

While many of the students were making decisions about editing their videotaped visit, others were in the school's library interviewing school custodian Elbert Drum, who attended the Arnsberg School and whose grandfather was among the first settlers in the Oak Ridge area.

The students call their project "living history" because much of what they have found out so far about the 13 schools has been drawn from the recollections of those who are still living. This is in contrast to many historical studies, the content of which relies largely upon what has been written before.

"We are getting quite a few people who call us with information or donate photographs," said Wise. "One lady had an old semester enrollment book and others have had old report cards."

One of the unique facets of the living history project is the fact that many of the students come from established Oak Ridge area families and, as often as not, fathers, aunts, uncles or grandparents are alumni of one of the schools and are happy to recollect the time they spent in the one-room buildings.

"It helps us all learn a lot about how our parents learned because a lot of the students here have parents who learned in the one-room schools, said Craig Sebaugh, a freshman who lives on a dairy farm about a quarter of a mile from the still-standing Critesville School, where his father Daniel Sebaugh was a student. "It's a good opportunity to learn about the community and how people went to school around here."

When asked if he would be interested in attending a one-room school knowing what he knows now, Sebaugh laughed and said, "I don't think so; discipline was pretty tough then."

Another student with past ties to the old schools is Jadie Eisenhower.

"My grandpa taught at Critesville and my mom and dad went to the schools we're researching," Eisenhower explained, adding that her dad was an alumnus of the Apple Creek School while her mom attended Daisy School.

"I had heard a lot about the schools before we started researching them and now I'm interested in learning more," said Eisenhower, a junior.

For senior Simon Croonenbroeck, the living history project is a unique opportunity. A foreign exchange student from Germany, compiling the district's history has given him a unique opportunity to get to know the countryside and the people who live in it.

"I think if I had been an exchange student somewhere else I wouldn't have had this opportunity," he said. "I've learned a lot about the country and the people because we go out and interview people and they also come to us to be interviewed."

Such "hands-on" projects are nothing new to students in Oak Ridge's EXCELS program. In past years, students have done research in the county clerk's office at Jackson to discover the history of the various buildings in Oak Ridge.

Currently, students in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades are completing a project called "You're a Part of History," in which they are researching the deeds to the homes in which the live as well as their own family history through a project Wise calls "Geographical Genealogy." The students are tracing their family history as far back as possible and then marking their families' origins on a map. Many, she said, have recent ancestors who traveled here from Germany while others are from established families who have been in the area for many generations.

In order to conduct the program, Wise did some research of her own, studying and completing the test to receive a commercial drivers license so that she could transport students by bus to historical sites and other locations to do research.

Many of the students feel learning history is more fun when they are allowed to be involved in the learning process.

"It's more interesting when you know some of the people," said sophomore Amy Strickland, whose uncles attended Buckeye School. "I like the project because it's better than just reading history."

Those who have suggestions or who are interested in contributing their own recollections to the living history project may contact Wise at (314) 266-3232 or write the class at Oak Ridge R-VI EXCELS, P.O. Box 10, Oak Ridge, Mo., 63769.