1892 School Was South Sound Pioneer
By Scott Fontaine, The News Tribune, Tacoma, Wash.
Jun. 4–The world was a lot different in 1892.
Grover Cleveland defeated Benjamin Harrison to win the presidency, author J.R.R. Tolkien was born, and poet Walt Whitman died.
And the doors to what eventually became Steilacoom’s Pioneer Middle School first opened.
The school has since undergone several renovations and additions while educating thousands of the town’s children. But a school fit for the 19th century doesn’t quite work in the 21st, so hundreds of former and current students and teachers and other community members gathered in Pioneer’s gymnasium Saturday to bid farewell to the school, which is closing this month.
A new Pioneer Middle School — one boasting 106,000 square feet and costing $34.6 million — will open this fall in DuPont.
“The memory of the school lives on not in the walls, but in your heart,” Al Lawrence, the chairman of the Steilacoom Historical School District board, told the audience.
A cavalcade of speakers shared their favorite memories. The choir and band performed for the crowd. The Associated Student Body officers filled a time capsule — set to be opened in 25 years — with everything from yearbooks to pictures to a school district staff directory.
Three students read poems paying homage to the school, and a slide show documented its transformation from the wooden building known as Steilacoom School to today’s more modern structure.
Principal Kristi Webster and assistant principal Paula Gayson rang the school’s iconic bell one last time in front of a cheering crowd. A Boy Scout troop lowered the flags and retired them, and then the assembled moved into the cafeteria to snack on cookies and reminisce.
“We have good memories here,” said Roberta Blake, who graduated from Pioneer in 1967 and teaches there today. “So it’s a bit bittersweet. But we’ve got a great new school opening up, and it’s an exciting time.”
Blake, whose mother and grandfather also attended the school, said the lasting memories are the little things, like the cafeteria’s cinnamon rolls — cooked up fresh every Friday.
Greg Slemp, who graduated in 1964, remembers riding buses to sporting events throughout the area and the two influential men who ferried the students safely to and from school.
“Mr. Roseveare and Mr. Camas — they were very important in our young lives,” said Slemp, a retired Air Force pilot. “They were the janitors and bus drivers, but they were always friendly and really cared.”
The School Board has yet to decide what to do with the building, which lacked necessities like lockers for every student and sinks in the science lab. A district advisory committee has been studying uses for the building and is expected to submit its report to the board next month.
“The school building itself is old, but you really don’t notice those things when you’ve been here so long,” said seventh-grader Travis Pine, next year’s student body president. “So you start to focus on the good things — like the people and the community.”
Scott Fontaine: 253-320-4758
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