Like a ghost breaking dishes and slamming doors in a haunted house, the 111-year-old Elbridge Gerry School issued a pointed reminder to Marblehead residents and town officials when a minor heating oil spill closed the school for a week.
No one was hurt in the Jan. 10 incident and the 16 gallons of spilled heating oil were more of a nose-wrinkling inconvenience than an environmental threat. But town officials took the sensible step of closing the school and sending students to the Coffin School next door until the cleanup could be completed and the results inspected.
Named for a 19th-century Massachusetts governor whose clever ways of crafting political districts earned him dictionary immortality, the Gerry is a town landmark that isn’t going to fade quietly into the town’s history.
The indirect message sent by the Gerry is that the town can’t forget the school is an old building even as residents contemplate the Gerry’s future.
Town Meeting last May voted to approve a $750,000 feasibility study for the Gerry and state school building officials have endorsed the study. The process of moving forward with an assessment of Gerry’s future is going to be painstaking and expensive. But Marblehead is making the right decision to continue to believe in a school building constructed before town residents were born.
So much of modern education is shiny and new, from the mobile devices glued to every child’s hands to new schools springing up in communities around Marblehead. New education concepts flood teacher seminars and educator think tanks every year and thinking up a new acronym for the latest assessment test has almost become an academic cottage industry.
There is something fitting about a small town thinking carefully, maybe even lovingly, about how to preserve its past in the form of a school that served as a crucible for shaping generation after generation of young lives.
There is nothing glittery, shiny or really new about the Gerry. Even its name hearkens back to dusty leather-bound books. But the school hasn’t stood as a local bastion of education since 1906 by accident.
Schools were built a century ago as bastions to education and its enduring importance. The people who worked in them bore a mantle of authority that made them surrogate parents between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. every day. The knowledge dispensed in the classrooms of old schools like the Gerry became building blocks for lessons taught in higher grades and, eventually, in higher education.
Schools were built to impress, not to welcome, and the message new students absorbed when they walked into the big brick buildings was education is a privilege, a pursuit with a payoff that is years in the making and a cornerstone of a civil society.
Modern schools are packed with technology, new learning concepts, and space for “cluster learning” and “extended day study.” But it is hard not to argue that brand-new schools lack the soul, that sense of being time-tried and tested, that schools such as the Gerry or Brickett in Lynn possess.
Let money be well spent on studying Gerry School’s future and let the people undertaking the analysis never forget what Gerry has meant to Marblehead.