Differences can’t break community

Has enough time passed for us to go to the land of uncomfortable memories?

Jay School Corporation classes are now in session. And the Jay County High School building is now Jay County Junior-Senior High School.

How did we get here? It’s been a long and sometimes painful journey.

Let’s start at the beginning, back in the early 1960s.

At that point, there was no Jay School Corporation. Instead, a patchwork of school systems covered the county like a flawed quilt.

Some were pretty good. Some didn’t do a great job of meeting their students’ needs.

The first — controversial — step was to bring all of those entities together into one. That required a referendum by voters.

And while it passed, there were immediately misgivings among school communities that felt they’d lose their identities when swallowed up into something larger.

At one point early in the 1960s, the newly constituted school board looked for outside assistance. It commissioned a study by Indiana University.

The results came back in 1964, and the you-know-what instantly hit the fan.

IU’s experts, with all the detachment that comes from being an expert, called for a single county high school to be located near the center of the county — in other words, near Portland.

They actually went a step further, suggesting that the county’s junior highs also be consolidated on the same site.

The experts then went home, patting themselves on the back for solving the local rubes’ problems. But the fight had just begun.

Lines were drawn. Loyalties were tested.

In 1964, the county had an abundance of high schools: Portland, Dunkirk, Redkey, Pennville, Bryant, Madison, Poling and Gov. I.P. Gray.

Some were on their last legs — Gray is the most obvious example — but many were pretty solid. There were two questions: Were those schools sustainable? And were they serving the needs of their students?

The answers to those questions were mixed. The first one was pretty easy, but the second one was tougher.

Rural schools like Poling and Madison didn’t offer the necessary courses for students to get into college, and, without a student deferment from the draft, male graduates would quickly be headed to Vietnam.

On top of that, there were the emotional and sentimental issues, usually revolving around basketball, as is so often the case in Indiana.

Loss of a community’s team inevitably meant a corresponding loss of a community’s identity. It couldn’t be measured, but it was real just the same.

The fight went on for more than 10 years, waged in coffee shops, at school board meetings and in letters to the editor.

I wrote a paper in high school about the issue and wrote another one in college, because the debate was still going on.

Finally, Jay County High School opened its doors in 1975 and the fight seemed to be behind us.

But something happened.

Demographic changes — population shifts, smaller families and other things beyond our control — kept shrinking the enrollment of schools all over the county. It was a drip-drip-drip, but eventually it took its toll.

A high school building constructed for one number of students was suddenly bigger than it needed to be.

And elementary school buildings that had been built based upon enrollment projections were now larger than they needed to be.

The phrase “sea change” is over-used. But this was a “sea-change.” So many of the assumptions and projections that had gone into the buildings didn’t fit the new reality.

And so, the second phase of consolidation began.

Schools were closed. Pennville Elementary went first. Judge Haynes, my school (named in honor of my great-grandfather) followed.

And, inevitably, the county’s two middle schools were merged into Jay County Junior-Senior High School. The former West Jay building is now an elementary school, as is the former East Jay building, which is the former Portland High School building.

None of this has been easy. And there are some uncomfortable memories.

But we are, as a community, where events have taken us. And we are, in spite of our occasional differences, a community.