High School Education
The Schools
As students transitioned from childhood to their teenage years, they also made the transition from their elementary and middle schools to junior-high and high schools. In St. Augustine area, West Augustine students generally attended St. Augustine High, Ketterlinus High, Murray High, and Excelsior High. The latter two were the city’s segregated locations for African American students before the integration process began after the 1954 Brown v. Board decision made segregation of schools illegal. After the Supreme Court decision, however, Murray High School found itself on the road to integration and Exelsior faced its final days as a school until its closure in 1968.
Integration
In the aftermath of the Brown v. Board decision, integration began in the city of St. Augustine. Patricia Weddle worked with the mayor of the city, and recalled their decision to choose Murray High School as the first to integrate. Segregation had begun the basis of "seperate but equal" accommadation, but what Weddle recalled at Murray the first time they went to evaluate it "shocked" her. She remembers seeing "lockers in the hall without doors on them, hunks of tile missin' out of the floor. They had those huge windows...with no curtains, no shades on 'em. There were bathrooms with no doors on the stalls....The inside of the building was just in shambles." Clearly, in St. Augustine accommodations were certainly seperate, but by no means equal. Therefore, Weddle and the committe went around taking pictures of the desolate school - pictures that member Hoopie Tebault used against the school board to get them to upgrade the school.
Once the school had been brought up to standards, residents of West Augustine remembered the process of beginning the busing process. Once again, Patricia Weddle provides key insight into this part of St. Augustine's history. Her daughter was involved in these busing programs, and as a result "it was almost every year she was bused to a different school." Weddle was not a fan of the program, as she saw the constant change her daughter had to got through - "this, to me, was so unfair, but there was no way to avoid it."
School Books
One of the first unique aspects of the high school experience, both in modern times and in the days of mid-20th century St. Augustine, for those coming out of middle and elementary school are text books. Louis Nestor remembered there being books at St. Augustine High School, that "there was writing in the books, and they weren't in good shape." Unlike today, however, students did not always get their books for free. Virginia DeBeau and Patricia Weddle remembered that they were supplied by the school. But, Nestor also noted that "you just had to pay a deposit on 'em, so if you lost it, and you didn't have anything to turn in, you paid for the book when you went to the next grade."
Extra-Curricular Activities
Students who attended the various high schools around the city participated in a number of extra-curricular activities, particularly sports. Seen in the cover picture for the Education section, Bernice Harper was a part of Excelsior Middle's cheerleading team. Irvine Morrison also recounted his time in sports, where he "played football and basketball, not too much baseball. We did mostly sandlot baseball."
If sports were not for students, they may have participated in other activities such as the marching band. Pictured here are group photos of the Murray High School Marching Band.
However, not all students were able to do much outside of school. Irvine Morrison, though he played sports to "that way I didn't have to come to work," nevertheless missed out on some of the youth organizations of the period. 4-H, for example, was something that they "didn't have...at the Catholic school [St. Joseph's] like they did in the public schools."