A look at past school superintendents

Art Johnson, ousted in February as Palm Beach County School Superintendent, is one of 23 (actually 22, one served twice), dating back to when the area still was in Dade County before it split in 1909.

The shortest tenure: 1 month (James Daniels, 1991). The longest: 15 years (Howell Watkins, 1948-1964).

Here’s a list, with starting date:

1. James C. Harris (July 13, 1900): The first superintendent, he also founded the downtown West Palm Beach store that still operates.

2. Henry W. Lewis (Dec. 9, 1910): The county’s first elected superintendent, a news article called him a “painstaking officer.”

3. Guy Metcalf (above, Jan. 2, 1917): Publisher of the region’s first newspaper, a mayor of West Palm Beach, and a key mover in the county’s split from Dade, he was arrested for forging a bill for $333.49 for science equipment; he was found dead the next day of an apparent suicide.

4. Jackson B. McDonald (Feb. 15, 1918): He went on to become Martin County’s first superintendent when the county split off in 1925.

5. W. E. Keen (Dec. 4, 1918): Reported to the governor in 1920 that in two years, enrollment had jumped from 2,000 to nearly 2,500 — at least in the white schools. Black enrollment isn’t mentioned. He also said seven rural schools had been built. And he complained that the School Board pay of only $4 a day mostly attracted “inexperienced business men.”

6. Agnes Ballard (Jan. 4, 1921): The county’s first — and for seven decades, the only — female superintendent also was Florida’s first female licensed architect.

7. Joe A.Youngblood (Jan. 6, 1925): He steered the booming region for a dozen years before leaving to run the National Youth Administration.

8. John I. Leonard (above, Sept. 21, 1936): In his dozen years, the county struggled through the Depression, World War II came right to Florida’s shores, and black teachers began struggling for equal rights. He also was the first president of Palm Beach Junior — now State — College.

9. Howell L.Watkins (above, July 2, 1948): The county’s longest-serving superintendent, Watkins founded Palm Beach Junior College in 1933 and was its dean.

Next week: From the boom years to today.

Tags: schools

Palm Beach County Schools: The First 100 Years

Want to learn more about the history of Palm Beach County’s public schools and help students further their education at the same time? You can do both for just $20.

That’s the price for a copy of Palm Beach County Schools: The First 100 Years. The book, written by retired Palm Beach Post editorial writer Bill McGoun and published by the school district, details the development of public education from the arrival of the first settlers until the present day.

It tells of the people who built the system and of the challenges they faced, ranging from explosive growth to the dismantling of racial segregation to the influx of students from all over the world speaking more than 140 languages.

Read about:

Guy Metcalf, the star-crossed publisher and promoter turned politician.

Agnes Ballard and Clara Stypmann, who held public office as soon as women could vote in Florida.

Howell L. Watkins, who helped write state education law and presided over Florida’s first public junior college.

Robert Fulton and William Holland, who worked inside and outside the system to break down racial barriers.

The book is being distributed by the Lake Worth High School Alumni Foundation. You can order a copy online here or send a check payable to LWHS Alumni, to P.O. Box 1166, Lake Worth, FL 33460.

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The foundation also is distributing Lake Worth High School: A History, an in-depth look at the oldest high school in Palm Beach County still housed on the original campus. It tells decade by decade how the school grew and how the events around it affected its development.

Tags: schools

Mystery solved: Riviera Beach Elementary School was built in 1930

April Fools’ Day usually is reserved for pranks and phony stories. Today we’ll confront a mystery, submitted for our consideration by L.J. Parker, a researcher with the Lake Park Historical Society and a frequent contributor to Post Time:

“We had been asked to solve a mystery of a plaque from Riviera Beach Elementary School. Dorothy Gooding was a teacher there from 1951 to 1962 and she doesn’t know what to make of this. The plaque is dated 1961 very plainly. It was on a two-story building that was torn down several years ago. The plaque was rescued by Riviera Beach historian Henry McNish and he is wanting to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the school. Problem is that the school was going on there long before.”

He added, “Your column has found many answers to questions that previously couldn’t be answered.”

Of course, L.J. was both flattering and challenging us. It worked!

Riviera Beach Elementary, at 200 12th St., closed in 1992. School district records show it was built in 1930. So why does this plaque suggest it was built in 1961?

The answer: In late May 1961, our archives show, the school board approved a two-story, eight-classroom addition which would connect to a cafeteria built the previous year. The wing, for first- and sixth-graders, was dedicated Oct. 19, 1961.

The board at the same time approved a new Jefferson Davis High School, later Jefferson Davis Middle School. In June 2005, the district decided it was politically incorrect to have a school named for the president of the Confederacy, and it was renamed Palm Springs Middle.

Also of interest, some of the names on that 1961 plaque:

Howell L. Watkins, namesake of the middle school in Palm Beach Gardens, was Palm Beach High principal for 15 years, then schools superintendent from 1948 to 1964. In 1933, he helped found Palm Beach Junior — now State — College, the first of its kind in Florida. He died in 1965.

Ralph Kettler served on the school board from 1946 to 1962 and died in 1975. In 1910, when he was 22 months old, his father, movie theater pioneer Carl Kettler, posed him atop a stuffed alligator. You can see that picture here, and on the cover of the Post’s West Palm Beach history book, Pioneers in Paradise. Copies of the 2004 update still are available from the West Palm Beach city clerk’s office.

This plaque was found at the former Riviera Beach Elementary School. (Photo courtesy of L.J. Parker, Lake Park Historical Society.)

Tags: Riviera Beach, schools

Delray’s Old School Square restored to its former glory

On March 9, 1991, the restored 1926 gymnasium at the Old School Square Cultural Arts Center made its debut with a 1950s-themed prom. The opening of the gymnasium marked the halfway point of the restoration of the four-acre site. The 1913 Delray Elementary building reopened in 1990 as the Cornell Museum of Art and American Culture, and the Crest Theatre in the former Delray High School opened in 1993.

This undated Palm Beach Post file photo shows the old Delray Elementary School in its early days.

Another 1920s shot of the school and all the entire student body is here.

Students file out of the main building in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

Some of the names inscribed on the rafters of the school gym date back to the 1930s. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

Dorothy Dull, a kindergarten teacher who had been at the school for 19 years, quiets her students as they exit her classroom in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

Bert Fashaw shines the wood floors before the start of the 1981 school year. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo).

Students run on the field behind the school in June 1983. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

The 1925 high school building on Swinton Avenue in 1986. (Palm Beach Post staff file photo)

Tags: buildings, Delray Beach, schools, This Week in History

Teenagers Will Be Teenagers — even in ‘prim’ 1950s Palm Beach

By Bill McGoun

The so-called Silent ‘50s were not without their teenager pranks, ranging from cherry bombs to wooden Indians.

The cherry bomb, illegal in Florida, was a firework of choice. In Lake Worth a favorite place to plant one was in the banyan trees lining the Lucerne Avenue side of City Hall Annex. The building then was City Hall and the Police Department was in the northwest corner of the ground floor.

Teens would put a lighted cigarette over the fuse of a cherry bomb and place it in the tree. That gave them enough time to find a hiding place before the bomb went off, bringing officers scurrying out of their quarters to the amusement of the hidden teens.

When I was in Lake Worth High, one student’s final day in school was the one when he rolled a cherry bomb down an auditorium aisle during an assembly.

This isn’t the Stewart Pontiac wooden Indian, but it’s one of several cigar store Indians that can be found in and around Palm Beach County. (Lannis Waters/The Palm Beach Post)

In West Palm Beach, a favorite target of pranksters was the large wooden Indian at Stewart Pontiac, on the northeast corner of Dixie Highway and Flamingo Road. The Indian was “borrowed” with regularity and deposited at various places around the county. Once it wound up gracing the entrance to The Breakers in Palm Beach.

Weekends were when most “borrowing” took place. On many a Monday, employees of the agency would get a call from someone or other saying, “Your Indian is at our place. Come get it.”

One story around town concerned the occasion when, tipped off that the Indian was about to take a trip, a police car was circling the block. Unfortunately for the police, the pranksters saw them first and swept the Indian into their vehicle just after the cruiser had disappeared around the corner.

A couple of youths who had hidden themselves to watch reported the cruiser coming to a screeching stop when the officers saw the Indian was gone.

Palm Beach, probably because it had the image of being prim, was a favorite target of pranksters. One night, Worth Avenue was festooned with borrowed signs, such as the one in a potted plant in front of Peck and Peck which said “Moose Picnic,” with an arrow pointing toward the front door.

Less benign was the practice of “borrowing” from upscale homes such things as stone lions and ersatz hitching posts featuring a livery-clad figure holding a ring. A couple of incidents I remember concerned the “frat house” used for a while by our social club at what then was Palm Beach Junior College (fraternities were not allowed).

The house, just north of where Palm Coast Plaza would be built in West Palm Beach, apparently belonged to a relative of one of our members. I’m not sure what got us kicked out of it first, the desire of the owner to sell or the discovery by Florida Power & Light that we had bypassed the electric meter.

Anyway, I arrived at the house one evening and another member said, “See what we got.” He opened the closet beneath the stairs and pulled the tarp away from a concrete lion of the sort that decorate many homes.

“Don’t tell me where you got it,” I said. “When the police come around I want to be able to look them in the eye and say, ‘Officers, I don’t have the slightest idea in the world how that lion got here’.”

On another occasion, someone decided we needed one of those ersatz hitching posts in our front yard. Several members proceeded to “borrow” one after another member said he had seen a good one in Delray Beach. When the borrowers arrived, the other member took a look and said, “That’s not the one I meant.”

The borrowers informed him that if he thought they were going to back to Delray Beach and make an exchange, he was not playing with a full deck.

The hitching post was in place only a couple of weeks or so. Then someone stole it.

Nothing in Palm Beach County was as organized or regularized as the tradition in Hallandale, Broward County, of depositing an outhouse on the steps of city hall on Halloween. It became a rite of passage for Hallandale teens; many future civic leaders participated. In later year, outhouses having become extinct, the pranksters had to use Porta-Potties.

I’ve often heard the ‘50s described as a decade of silence between World War II and the Roaring ‘60s. That’s not really the case. The seeds that would sprout into full-scale rebellion already had been planted. Besides our pranks, we had our pegged pants, our ducktail haircuts…and our rock-and-roll music.

Bill McGoun is a retired editorial writer for The Palm Beach Post. He is the author of four history books, including Lake Worth High School: A History and Southeast Florida Pioneers, which tells the history of Palm Beach County, the Treasure Coast and the Lake Okeechobee region through the lives of noted individuals. He is working on a history of the Palm Beach County school system.

Tags: notorious crimes, schools