Elementary and Middle School Education
The Schools
For students in West Augustine, their educational journey likely started much like it does for students of the twenty-first century. As they entered the education system, they were placed in elementary and middle schools in St. Augustine area that included St. Joseph’s Academy, a Catholic girls' boarding school located on St. Geroge Street that also enrolled boys in day school. Other schools included Number Six School, Webster Elementary, Orange Street School, and an elementary school located on the grounds of Florida Memorial College.
Each student’s experience at these schools would have been unique to them, and indeed even more so as students from the West Augustine neighborhood attended segregated schools. As residents in the mid-20th century South, segregation of schools had been a norm for about half a century. In St. Augustine, Webster Elementary, Number Six School, the school located at Florida Memorial, and Excelsior Middle were all for the use of African American children only. Though these schools would greatly differ in accommodations and facilities, stories from residents who were former students in both white and black schools recorded similar memories that relate to other features of their early academic experience.
Transportation
Children in St. Augustine had several means of transportation to their schools. The omnipresent yellow buses, rides in their parents’ cars, and the long walks from the front door of their house to the door of the classroom are all experiences well known by children today as well as in the past in West Augustine. For instance, Betty Stirrup lived close enough to the grounds of the school at Florida Memorial, where her parents also worked, to walk there every day. Once she moved to Number Six School, however, she recalled that they "had a bus going there." Bernice Harper went to Excelsior Middle, and she also walked even though the distance from her home to Lincolnville was several miles. She remembered, however, that they eventually got "an old school bus." Walking to school, given the distance and state of the city during Harper's time, was not always very safe. She remembered "the things that young black girls had to worry about here in St. Augustine were white men stalking us" on her three-mile walks to school.
Health
Within each school, children in West Augustine often received much of their healthcare from school doctors and nurses. One of the most important functions of school health services were the vaccines and shots that they administered to all students free of charge. Children received vital smallpox, tetanus, and typhoid vaccinations, and as they became available for polio as well. Patricia Weddle recalled receiving her shots in the basement of Orange St. School. Students would be "marched up there, and kids were screamin' and hollering' and stuff." Weddle also recalled the polio shots, saying that "they'd do it to your arm and then take a little plastic dome thing and tape it to it. And oh, my gosh, your arm would swell up and be all red. It was horrid." Kids of today and of yesterday, no matter the generation, seem to always have hated their shots.
Unique to the St. Augustine schools that West Augustine children attended at this time were the school dentists. Students today are familiar with nurses and their clinics, but rarely have they ever visited a dentist right in or near their school. Students of the past, however, were all too familiar with their dentists, and many did not view them favorably. Patricia Weddle and Virginia DeBeau both had bad experiences with their school dentist, recalling that Dr. Smith at Orange Street "was the meanest, most cruel, heartless man that ever lived." Weddle recalled that he would "pinch your teeth out" with nicotine stained hands while "you'd be screamin' and hollerin', and he'd whack ya." She knew this as he "smacked" her borther, making her mother furious. DuBeau said she only went to his office one time, and after complaining to her mother was exempted from any further visits. To neatly sum up their experience, they described Dr. Smith's office as a "torture chamber."
Discipline
A part of every child’s experience in school is their run-ins with the rules. Just as young students today can be unruly, back in the mid-20th century West Augustine children were equally as youthful. Teachers in public schools, up until fairly recently in fact, were given the authority to inflict corporal punishment on their students. Those that acted up were subject to spanking or swatting, often, as residents recalled, by mean-spirited teachers. Patricia Weddle and Virginia DeBeau recalled the principle at Orange Street, for instance, for her cruelty. According to them, "if your classroom was close enough to her office, you could hear it and hear the kids screamin'....she had a big old paddle in there, and the kids rumored that she had an electric paddle." They went into even further detail, stating that "you had to lay down. She strapped you down, and then she turned on the button of the electric paddlin' machine." Many today would consider this kind of punishment wrong, but, as Betty Stirrup notes, "it was normal to us." Teachers at the time were seen as "your parent when your parents wasn't around," and so no one objected to paddlings or swats across the hands with "a ruler or a belt or whatever."
Students who attended St. Joseph’s Academy were also all too familiar with the disposition of the nuns who ran their school with iron fists. Student Irvine Morrison recalls that at the Academy, "You didn't get away with anything....They were really dedicated." Patricia Weddle also attended St. Joseph's and remembers the nuns, saying that they were "very strict." She recalled the story of a boy in her class that talked back to one of the nuns, after which she "picked up a book, threw it at him, and knocked his tooth out."