Becoming Patriots

Editor’s note: This is the ninth in a series of stories about Jay County’s consolidation to a single high school. The series will look at each of the five high schools that merged, the teachers, athletics and the first graduating class at JCHS. It will run on Saturdays through mid-August.
Some in Jay County were anxious about the merging of Portland, Dunkirk, Redkey, Pennville and Bryant’s high schools into a single school 40 years ago.
Would there be friction? Would students get along?
“I think it was fraught with uncertainty,” recalled retired choral music teacher Glen Priest.
“There was trepidation,” said retired social studies teacher Steve Ford.
That was true not only for students and their parents but for teachers as well.
“You were facing a bunch of kids you’d never seen before,” said Priest.
In the end, teachers who helped make the transition from the five high schools into Jay County High School agreed, the process was remarkably smooth.
For that, they credit leadership provided by key administrators and staff and — ultimately — the kids themselves.
“The kids all kind of looked forward to it,” said former guidance counselor Glen Bryant. “When we got together at the high school, they just merged.”
“It went amazingly smoothly,” said Ford. “And probably that goes back to (principal) Jim Elbert.”
Elbert was on contract a full year before the school opened its doors, in part because construction was running behind schedule.
He used that year, recalled retired social studies teacher Jane Switzer, to build the foundation for a united student body.
“Student government was really important to him,” said Switzer.
Elbert recruited student leaders from each of the five schools to meet together with Switzer to set the groundwork for the JCHS student council. During the year before the school opened, the group gathered to decide matters like the school song and to develop a constitution for the student council.
“We spent a year putting it together,” recalled Switzer.
Elbert was focused on creating a strong JCHS identity. He banned, for instance, the wearing of varsity letter jackets from any of the old schools.
Retired math teacher Robert Freemyer also credited others in the school’s leadership team.
“I thought that first year out there that Bob Anderson (former Redkey High School principal and the first JCHS dean of students), Dave Humbert (band director) and Tom Bruin (head football coach) held us all together. … Bob was definitely outstanding as dean of students,” said Freemyer.
Bryant believes athletic director Harold Schutz, with his lively antics on the Jay Today announcements each morning, played an important role in building a sense of camaraderie and school spirit.
“We had a lot of new teachers that were new to the system,” recalled Bryant.
“It was a young staff and it was a positive staff,” said Switzer.
And there were some pleasant surprises.
Priest recalled with delight the number of “amazing young voices” he encountered when the five student bodies were merged into one.
Bev Priest, who taught English at Portland High School before moving to JCHS that first year, was caught by surprise by students from earlier in her career. At one point she taught a combined second and third grade class of 42 students at Gov. I.P. Gray School in New Mount Pleasant.
“They ended up being at Jay County High School as 10th graders,” she recalled with a laugh. “It was quite an interesting thing to have them after all those years.”
Elbert’s leadership, Anderson’s firm but fair sense of discipline, Humbert’s success with the Marching Patriots and a winning season by Bruin’s football team all played a role in bringing the school together.
“Jay County High School was a lot more competitive, and people liked that right off,” said Priest. “People had to be blown away” by the band.
Ford likes to tell a story about supervising lunch in the commons during the autumn of 1975. The first day, he said, students sat in groups identifiable by their former schools. By the end of the week, those groups had evaporated and were replaced by clusters of farm kids or jocks or academic achievers or “hippies.”
The exception, from the start, was the band. They sat together from the beginning because they’d been together all summer.
“Humbert had already made Patriots out of them,” said Ford.