Fishweir Elementary School: In Defense of a Century of a Community’s Love for Its Children (2024)

byTim Gilmore, 5/31/2024

1. The Lesson Plan

Fishweir Elementary School is its students, their parents, their families, and not just presently. Like those of a grandmotherly live oak, its roots branch far underground, offering as much support from underneath as its canopy offers shelter, beauty and awe.

Walk beneath the brick arches at Public School No. 20 and try to visualize everything that’s happened since 1917, an ever-growing narrative, an accumulation of love, that moves us, its characters, in ways of which we’re almost entirely unaware.

So what could seem stranger? More counterproductive? More designed to promote community resentment, angst, anxiety? What action could more adequately tell a community, “Your ‘leaders’ do not care about you!”?

In its 107 years, Fishweir has educated tens of thousands of children. If its last school lesson is that children who love their school and excel here will have that school stripped away from them, that tragedy will be outweighed only by its injustice! On the other hand, if the parents, teachers and students at Fishweir and other schools the district wants to close win their struggle, what better lesson?

If the Duval County School Board takes the recommendations of a recent “master plan” to close many of this city’s most beloved schools, it will devastate communities across Jacksonville. Many of these schools, including Fishweir, are among the city’s best-performing. Many of them are smaller schools, more personable and accessible, members of the families of their students. Shuttering good schools traumatizes families and leaves scorched-earth abysses in the hearts of neighborhoods.

The new “master plan” recommends closing nearly 30 schools in Duval County. Further south, Broward County is considering closing 42 schools. It’s a Florida-wide problem, yet another state of emergency in Florida’s education systems. It’s a crisis decades in the making, a moment many of Florida’s elected leaders have, in fact, long actively sought.

If Fishweir remains open, it will be because the school has families who believe they can effect change, a luxury less privileged schools don’t have. Constantly traumatized communities, of which Florida has many, have little sense of agency, having internalized the fatalism and defeat with which the world constantly brutalizes them.

This story makes Fishweir representative, focusing on this small school as the whole problem in microcosm, because both my daughters attended Fishweir, and because I saw them, both now strong, smart, educated women in their 20s, when they first heard the news. I saw the tears well up in their eyes.

2. Stage Grace, 2008

Strange irony, that some of the moments of most intense pride in my children are times they don’t remember!

I can see, from 15 years ago, Emily’s dance teachers Cecelia Futo and her daughter Claire, clearly, vividly: “Mama Futo,” archetypally maternal, and Claire as pure poise on an axis of elegant strength. They knew how to challenge children without ever being unkind, the kinds of teachers who advocate for your children so fully they become extensions of your family.

Of course I felt proud of Emily when, just before Christmas in her last year at Fishweir, she got the role as Clara, the lead in The Nutcracker. What most filled my heart with joy, however, was how she moved through a moment that was not meant to be.

Drosselmeyer had handed the magic nutcracker to Clara and as she danced, turning through the music, alas, off went the nutcracker’s head! Only the wooden nub remained, protruding grotesquely through this childhood milestone. Emily, meanwhile, could have broken form, halted the dance, run after the bouncing head, but she never so much as paused. This strange, sweet child, always with a fairylike grace about her, missed now not a note.

When I mentioned the moment to her two years later, Emily didn’t recall it at all. To me, however, adoring father, it expressed something essential in her that I had known all along.

3. “Handsome New Schoolhouse,” 1917

Surely what sediments itself at Fishweir, in these brick buildings on this slight groundswell, the oceanic coquina of lives and growth, is an historical abundance of love that’s deeper and denser than what any of us can imagine.

In 1916, per The Florida Times-Union, “O.P. Woodco*ck was awarded the contract for the construction of the new four room schoolhouse at Fishweir Creek.” Slowly, then quickly, new houses proliferated, woodframe and brick and stucco. North Riverside Heights grew north of today’s Boone Park, “that part of Riverside which is developing faster than any section of the city,” as houses of the wealthy rose all along the river and a streetcar line extended.

In fact, Fishweir Elementary preceded Avondale, the 1920 real estate development that called itself “Riverside’s Residential Ideal” and subsumed earlier smaller developments like Arden and Edgewood.

So in March 1917, said the Times-Union, the Fishweir Mothers’ Club hosted an afternoon housewarming in “the handsome new schoolhouse,” Fishweir Grammar School, already “occupied by a happy group of pupils and an able corps of teachers,” a building “commodious and so constructed that additions may be made as this thriving suburb develops.” The “mother’s club” [sic] had “posted” the “Ortega road” so “automobilists” could “easily find the school.”

That first year, 70 students attended Fishweir, where two teachers, one staff member and Principal Elizabeth Bogart, petite and gray-haired, a steely disciplinarian, worked in four rooms. The school had no cafeteria until 1949 and for years a neighbor named “Mrs. Parsons” – newspapers rarely reported women’s first names then – prepared daily lunches for which students paid 15 cents.

4. Purple Rhombus, Velvet Curtains, Early 2000s

My younger daughter recalls Jazmin Rivera, her “favorite lunch lady,” handing out cupcakes she’d baked for the school’s 90^th. Veda was in first grade. She remembers Emily, three years older, being a China doll in The Nutcracker and Veda being cast as a flower. She remembers that Darlene Pritchard, “the safety patrol lady,” loved Mickey Mouse and rescued animals. “She used to collect any uneaten fruits and vegetables after lunch and take them home to the squirrels.” She remembers how good it felt to hear her poem in the voice of her fifth-grade teacher when Ms. Morris read it aloud to the class.

“My earliest memory at Fishweir,” Veda says, “is of sitting on Ms. Kothman’s mat in Kindergarten” in 2006. Students took turns sitting on and naming the mat’s different colors and shapes. “I don’t remember my shape or color, but the girl next to me had a purple rhombus. Not a diamond. We’d been corrected already. I was eager to announce my colored shape and was saying whatever the combination was over and over in my head. When it was my turn, I confidently answered, ‘Purple rhombus.’ My brain had picked up on the girl before me saying that and for some reason I said the same thing. I tried to correct it, but Ms. Kothman corrected me first. I felt annoyed that I didn’t get to show off my skills.”

Fishweir felt like the setting in a child’s “chapter book,” where children solve mysteries, or rescue animals. “I definitely had a sense of the school being old,” Veda says, and she loved that about it. The age of the school, in fact, stimulated kids’ imaginations.

“There were all sorts of stories that you only hear about old buildings. Supposedly the original boys’ bathroom had been in the basem*nt, and it was still there, and haunted. Supposedly, there was the ghost of a student haunting the last stall in the girls’ bathroom. Supposedly, there was a young female ghost haunting the back entrance to the auditorium, which came from the courtyard. The courtyard always had a slightly mysterious feel, because we usually weren’t allowed to go there. Also in the auditorium, there was a paper airplane stuck in the blinds of the high windows that was rumored to have been there for 50 years. It could have been lodged there the year before, who knows, but that was the rumor.”

Even if you weren’t in a particular teacher’s class, Veda tells me, “you knew them personally,” and even as a small child, she thought Fishweir felt “like a community.”

She adds, “It was such a fun school for a kid to go to. Kids don’t like shiny new buildings. They like dramatic, heavy velvet curtains in an auditorium, arched doorways, beautiful courtyards.” Veda and her friends were always “jealous of kids in the classrooms with large back stairways going directly onto the playground,” she says, “and in fifth grade I was finally in one of those classrooms!”

5. Wigwams and Klan Parades, 1920s-1940s

In 1928, Principal Bogart published a book of supposed Indian tales called Legends of Kan-Yuk-Sa. She begins the book’s foreword, “Prince Lo-ko-see and Princess O-so-waw lived in Florida long before the white man came. Towns and cities stand where the wigwams of their people once stood, and on their hunting grounds are farms, orange groves and orchards.”

Like other well-intentioned white writers of her time, Bogart conflates Seminoles, who had come down to Florida to escape President Andrew Jackson’s genocide campaigns, with earlier tribes like the Mocama, the Timucuan group who’d inhabited Northeast Florida long beyond memory. Kanyuksa and Osowaw are supposed Seminole words, both now names of Florida ghost towns. Indigenous people never built wigwams in Florida.

A generation of schoolchildren participated in plays Bogart staged at Fishweir depicting her Indian legends. Some early photos show children standing on front steps beneath brick arches and wearing feathered headdresses unlike anything Florida Indians ever wore.

Despite Bogart’s inaccuracies, she was sensitive to the unjust treatment of indigenous peoples, writing, “The white men who came to live in Florida were not kind to the Indians. They took the land that the red men loved.” She quoted a supposed Everglades Seminole, without attribution: “Paleface has a forked tongue; we do not trust him.”

Stetson Kennedy attended Fishweir in the early and mid-1920s, growing up in a house on nearby Hedrick Street that could have walked off the plantation. He saw his first Ku Klux Klan parade on Jacksonville’s Main Street then.

However much he heard, read or acted in Elizabeth Bogart’s Indian tales, he grew up to collect more accurate ethnographies and folklore, working in Jax with black folklorist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston for the Federal Writers’ Project of President Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and, in the 1940s, infiltrating the Klan for the FBI, which he wrote about in his 1954 book I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan, later renamed The Klan Unmasked.

In his own way, as a white child of wealth and privilege, Kennedy heeded the advice of gospel, folk and blues musician Lead Belly’s admonition, at the end of his 1938 song “Scottsboro Boys” to “Stay woke, keep your eyes open.” Perhaps Kennedy’s curiosity about and sensitivity for others began with his elementary school principal’s empathy toward Florida’s indigenous people.

6. Mama Futo and Claire

Claire started school at Fishweir in third grade. Now she teaches music here. When my daughters attended Fishweir, Claire was the assistant dance teacher, helping her mother Cecelia. Not only was “Mama Futo” a loving and influential figure in my daughters’ lives, but she’s one of the main reasons Fishweir Elementary still exists.

Cecelia and Claire Futo sit across from me in the otherwise empty auditorium at the end of a schoolday. It’s been more than a decade since I’ve been in this 1930s room with walls of horsehair plaster, original chevron speakers and plaster medallion over the stage.

Cecelia and Claire often finish each other’s sentences, one depicting an image then looking to the other to pick up the thought. When the Futos put on Romeo and Juliet, students third through fifth grade used Shakespeare’s original Elizabethan English. Astonishingly, Cecelia didn’t start teaching until her 40s.

Beverly Cecelia Futo had a respiratory therapy degree from Georgia State and was volunteering at her daughter’s elementary school as “cultural arts chair” for the Parent Teacher Administration. She brought symphony musicians to the school, a black-and-white film festival, professional calligraphers and members of the Society for Creative Anachronism, who arrived in Renaissance costume on horses on Fishweir’s front lawn.

“I just kept doing more things,” Cecelia says, “and then they found out I had a ballet background. So the principal said, ‘Would you be willing to start a dance program?’”

The current crisis, in fact, is the third time Fishweir’s been threatened with closure since desegregation. In the mid-’70s and again in the late ’90s, officials considered shuttering Fishweir due to declining numbers of school-age children in the neighborhood. The second threat came as a nine year old Claire walked these halls and her mother showed kids that art could be both a career and a calling.

“So I started the dance program here in the auditorium,” Cecelia tells me. “We used cafeteria tables as our barres. I actually started teaching dance here before they hired me. Then they hired me officially as teacher of creative movement and ballet. So, just as this new thing, this new magnet system came into place, the dance class made us a performing arts magnet school, brought students from other zones, and we developed these amazing arts programs parents couldn’t find anywhere else.”

Instead of declining enrollment, Fishweir has, for years now, had wait lists.

From Fishweir, Claire became part of the first cohort at LaVilla School of the Arts, then attended Douglas Anderson School of the Arts and majored in music education at Jacksonville University with an emphasis on vocal studies. In many ways, she’s now taken her mother’s role at Fishweir. Nothing could seem more natural. The two women split the neighborhood duplex where Claire grew up.

Not only do they teach all day, stay after school for rehearsals and guide students toward and through evening and matinee productions, but they take active roles in every aspect of music and drama and technical theater at Fishweir. Claire had played Aunt March in Little Women in college and when the Futos decided to produce the show at Fishweir eight or nine years ago, they ordered historically correct costumes from a company called Recollections that makes costumes by hand, but only in adult sizes.

Together they describe six months of a living room full of stitching, of tailor’s chalk and spirit gum, of “everything layered,” petticoats and pantaloons, of facial hair and wigs. Cecelia estimates she worked an extra 20 hours a week on costumes for half the year.

In 2019, the national Art Schools Network picked Jacksonville to host its national conference and assembled at Fishweir Elementary as model elementary school of the arts. From all around the U.S. came artists and educators. “Our students performed for them,” Claire says, “and we took them on tours. We talked about our curricula and had this wonderful feeling of collaboration.”

Earlier this morning, I’d spoken to Jane Ruffin, who’d retired from Fishweir in 2022 but was subbing in the visual arts room. When I told her I was speaking with the Futos later, she suggested the school cast a bronze statue of the two women for the front lobby. “Let me tell you something,” Jane said, “that woman, Mama Futo, is why this school is still here!”

7. “A School Should Be Part of the Family”

Tradition is important to Jane Ruffin. She can’t stress that enough. She speaks in a small-town Panhandle accent, faster than I can think. She retired last year, but can’t keep herself away from Fishweir. So here she is this morning, wearing American flag earrings, waiting for kids to stream into the art room.

“I had the only karaoke machine in the school,” she reminisces, “and I taught these kids public speaking. And do you know, the shy ones, by the end of the year, they’d get on that microphone and tell stories? It boosted their self-confidence and that was such a delight, such a joy!”

Jane believes “a school should be part of the family,” and says, “Fishweir’s a generational school. I’m not even from here, but I’ve taught children whose parents came here and whose grandparents came here.”

Throughout her career, Jane Ruffin saw former Fishweir students who grew up to be civic leaders and business owners support the school. Often they were old-school conservatives from old money, old families, old networks. Representative Ander Crenshaw visited Jane’s classes to read aloud to them. Representative Cliff Stearns and City Council Members Jim Love and Jim Overton spoke at school events. “There have been so many dignitaries,” she says.

The irony, that in the name of conservatism politicians have purposely undermined traditional schools, siphoning public funding toward new schools with little to no accountability, is so stark it might cause whiplash.

Teachers at Fishweir knew charter schools and school vouchers were bleeding public schools, but seem stunned at the length of the list of recommended school closures, and even more stunned to find Fishweir there.

Increasingly, educators across Florida, the third most populous state in the nation, from Kindergarten through university, are forced to feel that in addition to all the work they do, they have to fight for their very survival.

8. Against the “Sword,” Love through Education, 1970s-2024

For more than a century, Fishweir has fostered and accumulated love through education, and for half a century, certain city and state politicians have sought to shut it down.

The school’s first half century was extraordinarily privileged, white and mostly wealthy, the school itself the inheritance of wealth. Even during the Great Depression, the district regularly funded the construction of new Fishweir classrooms. The population skewed less wealthy when the U.S. Navy built the Cumberland Housing Project nearby during World War II and by the late ’50s, Fishweir’s student population had nearly doubled to about 800.

Principal Mary Gittings hired Fishweir’s first black teacher, Margie McClendon, in May 1969. The number of students dropped in the ’70s, when Duval County opened racially desegregated sixth grade centers, removing a grade from elementary schools. As Duval finally complied with the Supreme Court’s 1956 Brown vs. Board of Education decision that racially separate education was not equal, Fishweir’s population further diversified.

In running for various offices in the 1970s, self-avowed white supremacist Warren Folks promised to halt desegregation busing and create “tuition grants for parents of children who prefer private schools.” It was a radical notion and city leaders scoffed at Folks, but founders of brand new private schools, including Trinity Christian Academy, promised parents no black child would ever attend and earned the nickname “segregation academies.”

As a stunt in his opposition to desegregation in 1970, Governor Claude Kirk left Tallahassee for Bradenton, where he theatrically suspended the school superintendent and the entire school board and holed himself up in the Manatee County School Administration Building. He directly disobeyed a U.S. District Court order that he appear before a judge for Contempt of Court, until the court charged him a daily $10,000 fine as long as he remained inside the building.

In the span of a couple of years, student populations at schools around the county, went from all-white to majority black, as white parents moved their children. The message to black families and children was clear and brutal.

It’s hard now to imagine that a school like Riverside High, where a diverse and mostly black student population recently won the struggle to change its name from that of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, was, before desegregation, mostly wealthy and white. Yearbooks from such pre-desegregation schools across the county regularly show pictures of white students in blackface and other racist tropes.

As civil rights victories seemed to accrue in the ’80s and ’90s, efforts to defund public education continued. As late as 1995, Duval County School Board Member Linda Sparks nominated Susan Lamb of the white supremacist National Association for the Advancement of White People to a school desegregation task force.

In 2021, Florida Commissioner of Education Richard Corcoran spoke at Hillsdale College in Michigan, a conservative “liberal arts” school that’s fostered “Hillsdale-model” charter schools across the country, including in Jacksonville, which siphon public funds from traditional public schools. Corcoran told his audience there that education should be “100 percent ideological,” saying, “Education is our sword. That’s our weapon. Education is our weapon.”

That same year, Duval County voters approved a half-cent sales tax to help fund the district’s ailing public schools. New Florida laws have forced the district to give nearly 17 percent of that funding – $62 million of $363 million generated – to charter schools. The law does not require charter schools to report how they spend the money, though district figures show a majority of it spent merely on rent. Florida legislators have recently sought $5 million just for the “anti-woke” Hillsdale-originated Jacksonville Classical Academy alone and Jacksonville City Council has allocated $1.4 million just for the school’s gymnasium.

9. Rallying Cry; or, The Last Day of the Last Show

When the curtain falls on the last production of a play, “it is,” says Cecelia Futo, “a death of sorts.” So, at the cast party following the close of Fishweir’s recent production of Finding Nemo, she says, “you know, we’re striking the set, and we’re showing the photos, and we’re all singing, and then I said” – and she pauses; she holds out an arm, palm down, face full of love, also a solemnity – “‘Wait. Let’s be still. Listen. This is a sacred moment.’”

Claire says, “We say all the time, the text is just black ink on white pages. That’s all it is. And we are the ones who bring the text to life.”

Fishweir may have celebrated its 100^th anniversary in 2017, but this auditorium, where the three of us now sit facing each other, is but six years from its own centennial. In the silence that spaces our voices, another solemnity, another sacredness, seems audible beneath this high ceiling, between these horsehair plaster walls.

“Two weeks ago,” says Cecelia, “we’re here late for rehearsal, and afterward, I walk through that courtyard. The sun hasn’t set yet. It’s still shining, but not as bright. The birds are chirping. And I thought” – long pause – “How sad – this is going to be – when we don’t hear all the footsteps – when we don’t hear all the voices, all the banter. And I just – I just don’t want that to happen.”

Here she was, in the sunset, thinking about a larger kind of sunset.

Rhetorically, Claire asks, “When is the last show? When is the closing day? We’re always thinking, as we close the show, ‘What’s the next show?’ We start working on the next show right away. But this is another question. When is the last day of the last show?”

Is Claire’s question a curtain call or rallying cry? Fishweir’s students are ending 2024 wondering if they will lose this extension of family. Fishweir, however, is one small school and its privilege grants it strong representation. It deserves that representation. Yet dozens, perhaps hundreds, of schools across Florida have less privilege, less representation and less chance of fighting the cultural and political forces that have hammered the diversity and inclusiveness of public education in Florida for half a century. How many among us will champion these children? And what will our lesson plan teach them?