Dirt Tossed To Signal Beginning Of New Liberty Lake Elementary

The first shovelful of earth flew this week at the groundbreaking for the long-awaited Liberty Lake Elementary School.

School officials were giddy. Not for 17 years has Central Valley School District built a new school. Families living near the empty field at Boone and Molter came out Monday, eager for the day their children can walk to school. Enough children gathered that principal-in-waiting Dennis Olson said, “This must be the first school assembly!”

It was history in the making. Or was it a repetition of history?

Monday’s groundbreaking was actually for the third school in Liberty Lake’s history. The first was a one-room clapboard school, built apparently in the 1890s. Second came a grander two-story brick school, built in 1912.

Students who went to that school are now in their 50s and older. Some have sharper memories than others, but they all remember the joy of those days.

Lumonde Hurtig Burtness, 86, was a first-grader at Liberty Lake in 1918. The first day of school, she remembers, went fine.

“But the second day I didn’t go. I walked down to the grocery story - which I understand is now a tavern - and the woman there said, ‘What’s the matter, didn’t you like going to school?’

“I said I liked it fine, but I don’t have to go today. It’s Saturday. Well, the woman called my mother to tell me it wasn’t Saturday and she came and got me.” Burtness cried all the way up the steps of the school, upset over being late.

In her day, between 1918 and 1924, the school ran as a one-room schoolhouse, grades one through eight, with the upstairs used for special occasions. A furnace was stoked with wood by the bigger boys. The bathrooms were outhouses. The older girls helped teach the first- and second-graders reading and phonics, Burtness remembers.

“It was a great school,” Liberty Lake resident Greg Tichy remembers. The school just went to fourth grade during its final years in the 1950s. The older classes were upstairs, the younger ones downstairs, with kindergarten in the basement.

“The teachers would let you learn up to your potential. If you were doing really good in reading or math, they would let you go up with the older kids. I got to go upstairs to Mrs. Brown’s room for reading.”

Tichy also remembers stops at the lake on the way home. “If you were lucky and there happened to be a spare dock floating on the lake, we used to go play Huckleberry Finn. It was just heaven.”

Parent-teacher conferences were different in those days. Tichy remembers his teacher coming to dinner. “We’d be in the formal dining room in our Sunday best and we’d have the parent-teacher conference over our roast beef and potatoes.

Before Tichy could finish fourth grade, the district closed the school, fearing it was no longer sound. In 1959 it was sold. The new owner tore it down, selling thousands of the bricks and using more in his own home on the property. He paid $3,000 for the old school.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo