With Final Graduation, Unionville Neighborhood’s Hamilton Closes After 53 Years

By Julie Hubbard, The Macon Telegraph, Ga.

May 24–Louise Poe had a mission Wednesday in returning to Hamilton Elementary School.

It was the last day of classes at the old school, and Poe wanted to make sure that its final graduating class knew the school’s alma mater.

It was important to her that all the sixth-graders know that part of the school’s history.

During the school’s graduation ceremony, the retired teacher stood with about 50 sixth-graders and they all sang together, including the lines, “Eugenia Hamilton School, Eugenia Hamilton School, to us you are a queen.”

“Eugenia Hamilton was a dear school to me,” Poe, 83, said later. “I won’t be passing by here anymore seeing the school open. I hate to see it go.”

The school has been a place of learning in Macon’s Unionville neighborhood for 53 years, which made the final graduation ceremony hard for many to take.

Poe started teaching science at the elementary school in 1956. She remembers checking students into the breakfast line decades ago and nursing them with her first-aid kit.

“We always wanted our children to find themselves,” she said, dressed in all white, a tradition of Hamilton teachers during graduation. “We wanted them to be accomplished in life, not to just play around, but to be someone in life. We worked hard on it.”

Some of those Hamilton graduates went on to become doctors, lawyers, teachers, nurses, and even a NASA scientist, she said. Macon’s mayor, Jack Ellis, is a Hamilton Elementary School graduate.

The Bibb County school board voted in March to close Hamilton, which sits on seven acres near the corner of Pio Nono Avenue and Mercer University Drive.

The building is too old and too small, and it’s losing student population, officials said.

Current fifth- and sixth-graders will move to the new Ballard-Hudson Middle School, and the rest of the student body will merge into Hartley Elementary about a mile away.

“It’s a happy upset,” said teacher Tamoco Hill, 27, who stood in her classroom doorway watching as the graduates in blue and gold caps and gowns marched by. “This is the last sixth-grade class to graduate. There won’t be any more. I don’t like it, but I have to deal with it.”

Hill also attended the elementary school as a child.

Hamilton, which was named for a former Bibb County educator, was built in 1954 to relieve overcrowding, and it housed one of the first special education programs in the system for black students. About a decade ago, it was a pilot site for the Title I program, which gives federal funding to high poverty schools.

“A lot of success stories have come from these doors,” principal Richard Mathis said. “It’s emotional, but change is good.”

Mathis said he would be reassigned to another school this fall.

Of the 32 certified teachers at Hamilton, only three will move to Hartley with the students.

Sixth-grade teacher Karen Austin, for example, is transferring to Weaver Middle School. She’s been teaching at Hamilton for 25 years and also attended Hamilton in the late 1960s.

“I’ll fight back tears today with clenched fists,” she said.

While Hamilton the school will close, the building itself will be used for another two years by Ingram-Pye Elementary School students while Ingram-Pye is renovated.

“We like the school,” sixth-grader Cemille Jackson said after posing for pictures with her friends. “We’re going to miss it.”

In the final moments of the sixth-grade graduation Wednesday, Mathis asked the graduates to stand.

“We’re going to recite our school motto for the last time at Eugenia Hamilton,” Mathis said, clearly emotional.

In unison, the students shouted: “I am somebody. … I can learn. My mind is a pearl, and I can learn anything in this world.”

To contact Julie Hubbard, call 744-4331.

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Macon Telegraph, Ga.

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