It’s a sad but poignant joke. Because of situations involving my family, I attended several different elementary and junior high schools between 1968 and 1981. I’ve half-snarkily called my educational experience “The Twelve,” in that from kindergarten in Slingerlands Elementary School to my senior year of high school with Street Academy, I was enrolled in twelve different educational institutions.
While I’ve spent considerable blog posts reminiscing about my beloved high school Street Academy of Albany, some of the other members of “The Twelve” have since shut their doors as well. A school that I attended in Corinth (school number four on my list) may now be a senior citizens center. Patrick F. Lyndon Elementary School in West Roxbury, Mass. (school number six on my list) was also senior housing for a while; I believe today it is a Montessori-based educational institution. And now, Clarksville Elementary becomes another school of mine to sadly close its doors.
Clarksville Elementary was school number two on the list of The Twelve. I only attended Clarksville for first grade – 1969-1970, and I have very few memories of my time at the school. I do remember that attending Clarksville meant that, for the first time, I rode a big yellow school bus to and from school. The bus driver was a very nice and friendly man, and his school bus had a special switch on the left side of his driving panel that opened and closed the bus door; most of the other buses had a big creaky, cranky door handle that the driver had to lean to his right to operate. I was the first person on the bus, and I always took the first right-side passenger seat on the bus, so I could see the entire trip from my home to school – with a pit-stop at Bethlehem Central’s parking lot, so that my bus could meet up with another school bus, and that bus’s passengers would climb on my bus, and all of us would go to school together.
While there were maybe 20 kids in Slingerlands Elementary, I was in a class of about 7 students at Clarksville. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand why I was transferred from the first school to the second – my mother told me it had something to do with me not being able to color inside the lines on coloring books, but my mother used to tell me a lot of things just to pacify me.
It wasn’t until later on in life that I found out why I attended Clarksville in the first place. Apparently I was one of those kids who was a quick learner in school, and I may have actually zipped past some of my classmates in terms of reading and other educational pursuits. So much so, in fact, that I probably got bored and anxious, and maybe my little five-year-old brain started acting out.
There is an anecdote about one of those acting out sessions while I was at Slingerlands Elementary. As I’m sitting in the principal’s office for some innocent kindergarten transgression, the principal’s secretary placed a student report form in her typewriter and began typing away.
I looked at what she typed. “That’s my name!” I exclaimed.
The secretary smiled. Young boy knows his name.
She continued typing.
“That’s where I live. Kenwood Avenue in Slingerlands.”
She stopped typing. This is getting odd.
In an instant, she grabbed the newspaper on her desk and handed the front page to me. “Can you read what’s at the top of this page?” she asked.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What does it say, little boy?” she queried, expecting me to say “Times Union.”
“It says ‘Capital Newspapers, Division of the Hearst Corporation, temperature cloudy with rain…”
Yep, the “top” of the page was the Times Union’s copyright information and the weather report.
I think she almost fainted.
So Clarksville may have been the place where little urchins like me could get an education at our own pace. Or maybe we were just the kids that Slingerlands Elementary weren’t prepared to handle. Don’t know. And 40 years later, it really doesn’t matter.
Anyways, I don’t have too many memories of Clarksville, other than it was a long trip to school and it was a long trip home. I only attended Clarksville for first grade, by the next year my mother had remarried, and I stopped living with my grandparents in Slingerlands; my next mailing address was the Alhambra Motor Home and Trailer Park in Greenfield Center, New York.
At which point, I attended Greenfield Center Elementary School. School number three.
But back to Clarksville. I’m sad that the school is closing, and I am sure that it has produced wonderful memories and generations of bright young minds.
I’m just sorry that I don’t share any of those same memories of the school as do they.
Chuck The Writer 