Alumni, others among those who want to make sure memories of the Consolidated School don’t fade
Oglethorpe County Primary School will be demolished after the completion of the new K-5 elementary school on Fairground Road. However, the building’s history will be preserved in the final construction of the new school and in the minds of its former students.
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After opening in 1955, what is now OCPS, was an all-Black school, which students Maggie Mobley and Willie Waller attended.
“It was first called the Oglethorpe Training School, which we did not like,” Mobley said. “You train animals; people, you teach.”
After complaints from students and parents, the name was changed to the Oglethorpe County Consolidated School. It brought Black students from various small schools around the county under one roof.
For many, the opening of Oglethorpe Consolidated School was their first opportunity to ride a bus to school.
“Many of the white schools had buses before we consolidated,” Waller said. “Because we had to walk to school, and they would ride the bus.”
Greg and Ashley Simpson, who are both involved in the Oglethorpe Atlas history project, have been working on locating the former small schools that were once scattered throughout the county.
“One year, you had dozens of white schools and Black schools all over the county,” Greg said. “In the next year, they built two consolidated schools almost next to each other, and all the white kids went to one school, and all Black kids went to another.”
The consolidated white school was built at the same time and is used as Oglethorpe County High School. While the buildings were identical in layout, the amenities and upkeep were not the same.
“There’s no doubt that everyone has realized historically, separate but equal sounded like a good theory, but in practice, it didn’t happen,” Greg said.
The consolidation of all the schools in the county was a big change for the students, especially when it came to class size.
“I found cousins that I didn’t even know I had until I went to that school,” Mobley said.
Despite numerous unfamiliar faces and a new environment, discipline was rarely an issue at the new school. The majority of families went to “great personal expenses” to afford an education; therefore, they remained well-behaved.
“At that point, there was no compulsory education,” Greg said. “If they were at school, they wanted to be there, they wanted to get an education.”
At just 4 years old, Waller knew he wanted to go to school. He and his father would provide kindling to heat the neighborhood schools, and in return, he was allowed to stay there while class was in session.
“I wasn’t old enough to go to school, but they would allow me to go and I would go and stay all day. So, at 4 years old, I was going to school,” he said.
Waller’s passion for academia led him to later become a member of the Board of Education.
After her graduation in 1963, Mobley went to business school and then returned to work as a secretary at the consolidated school until the late 1960s, before it was desegregated.
Moving forward
The demolition of the school has brought up questions from alumni and historians on how the county aims to commemorate its history.
“We are trying to facilitate, with Maggie and the alumni, to have those conversations about what they have in mind,” Greg said.
Paul Thiel, the school system’s director of operations, confirmed that bricks from the former OCPS will be used as pavers in the pavilion at the end of the fourth-grade wing of the new elementary school.
There will also be a ceremony in the fall that honors the historic school.
Mobley, Waller and other alumni hope to have a reunion to celebrate and commemorate the school’s history one last time before the building is torn down early next year.