City/Town: • Pine Bluff |
Location Class: • School |
Built: • ~1965 | Abandoned: • 2015 |
Status: • Abandoned • For Sale |
Photojournalist: • Michael Schwarz |
Table of Contents
The Oak Park Elementary School is apart of our series The City Left Behind: Pine Bluff, AR Season 1. Above you will find a trailer for the series. This location can be found in Episode Two The City Left Behind: Disappearing Children of Pine Bluff’s Abandoned Schools. Click here to view the playlists and subscribe to keep up with each episode!
Built around the 1960s the school was built in the heat of the Brown v. Board movement to desegregate schools. But the integration plan for Pine Bluff was different for everyone. Oak Park was a part of a plan to desegregate one grade every two years. But by 1970 the HEW had decided that this wasn’t moving along quickly enough and that Oak Park Elementary needed to rezone its district to “assign” more Black children to its school.
Oak Park Magnet and Foreign Language School
In its later years, it converted into a Magnet School, which is a public school that offer specialized learning opportunities and are open to all students, regardless of zip code. Was this in an effort to increase enrollment numbers at the school? Or perhaps try to enhance the education that was being offered within Pine Bluff.
The school had its own morning program on Channel 41 KOAK where students would act as anchors and give announcements, weather, lunch menu, and lead the pledge. The program was directed by teacher Mrs. Jo Stansfield in their studio. They also published their own newspapers, had two language labs and then regular courses as well.
As part of Abandoned Atlas Pine Bluff Salvage the VHS tapes project, we came across this program from the 1994 Oak Park Magnet School News Program.
Mayor Shirley Washington, was the Principal at Oak Park Elementary when the 9/11 tragedy hit. She had just come back into her office at Oak Park Elementary School when her phone rang. It was her great uncle L.B. Porter.
“Have you got your television on?” he asked her. Washington said she told him she had a TV set in her office, but it wasn’t on. “Turn your television on,” he said. “What’s going on?” Washington remembers asking him. “They just bombed the Twin Towers in New York City,” her uncle told her. “I could not believe my eyes,” Washington said.
Washington said she went out into the hall and was met by the librarian, who was spreading the news. One by one, other teachers turned on their televisions and started watching. The struggle, Washington said, was deciding how much to let students know about what was going on. The event was historic, so there was reason to tell them what was happening. On the other hand, she said, no one knew what might follow the plane crashes and disaster.
“It was so awful,” Washington said. “We all wondered if this was the beginning of the end. It was that tragic. We wanted students to be aware of the events, but we didn’t want them to be engulfed with fear.” In the years that followed the events of 9/11, Washington said she always observed the day at her school, and she said she herself gained a new respect for her country after that day. “I would say that my level of patriotism has increased as a result of 9/11,” she said. “And my respect for America’s service men and women also went to another level. They are the ones that put their lives on the line for all of us. The events of that day also focused my attention on what happened to us and what can happen to us so quickly.”
Renovations and Closure
New beginnings for the school came in 2007 with a renovation and new additions. A plaque in the school commemorates the efforts. But just five years later all that money poured into the elementary classrooms and paint jobs turned out to be almost for nothing as rumors began to circulate in early 2015 of Oak Park Elementary School and Southeast Middle School potentially closing.
Then a month before the end of the school year the announcement officially came that Oak Park Elementary School and Southeast would close at the end of the year. Also to come were 68 staff of the district being laid off and notified through the local paper rather than their employer.
The school was abandoned and quickly deteriorated due to break-ins and vandalism. And unfortunately, more times than not mysterious fires pop up at abandoned buildings and that day came for Oak Park Elementary School in March 2023. The fire luckily was contained to one classroom and was put out swiftly by PBFD. The school was sold at auction along with Indiana Street School and the School Admin Building in 2024, offering a hopeful new lease on life.
Gallery Below of Oak Park Elementary School
SOURCES
https://www.pbcommercial.com/news/2021/sep/11/city-leaders-remember911-fear-changes-since/
https://www.kark.com/news/numbers-decline-in-pine-bluff-school-district-2-schools-face-closure/
https://www.fox16.com/news/pine-bluff-school-district-lays-off-nearly-70-employees/
https://www.fox16.com/news/pine-bluff-school-district-lays-off-nearly-70-employees/
https://katv.com/archive/pine-bluff-school-district-responds-to-abrupt-layoffs
https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/local-regional-news/2015-04-23/nearly-70-pine-bluff-school-jobs-to-be-eliminated
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1978332/?match=1&terms=%22Oak%20Park%20Elementary%22%20pine%20bluff
https://www.newspapers.com/image/1886309/?match=1&terms=%22Oak%20Park%20Elementary%22%20pine%20bluff
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