March 27, 2016 9:52 pm
Published by Michael
A 1953 graduate of Lecompton High School, Smith is the go-to guy to operate the sound system in the third-floor theater and acts as the all-around building maintenance man, fixing what he can and contacting the right expert when it’s beyond his scope.
Photo by Richard Gwin
Historic Lecompton High School, 640 E. Forty-two years after the building stopped functioning as Lecompton High School with the consolidation that created the Perry-Lecompton High School, the building is again a center of community life through the efforts of scores of Lecompton Community Pride volunteers, she said.
Last weekend, the group had its biggest annual fundraiser, a two-day rummage sale that took in $5,000. Smith, Treaster and about 10 other volunteers were busy Wednesday boxing up the unsold items from the sale that cluttered all three floors of the school for donation to The Salvation Army.
For many of the volunteers, it’s a labor of respect for parents and grandparents whose taxes during tough economic times paid off the debt incurred to build the school, which opened in 1928, said Lecompton City Councilwoman Elsie Middleton. They built a handsome school, too, with an ocher-colored brick exterior topped with a now-gone red tile roof and finished inside with hallway floors and stairs of the same marble as Kansas University’s Strong Hall, she said.
Smith’s parents were among the taxpayers who paid for the school, he said, tracing his deep roots in the community to the Lane University and Territorial Capital Museum standing in the same block as the school.
“My grandmother went to college in the building next door, and my aunt was a teacher there,” he said.
He may have ducked out of the school on spring days, but he also played basketball in its now divided first-floor gym and was in plays in its third-floor theater, Smith said.
Town residents interested in opening the school for community use organized themselves as Lecompton Community Pride through Douglas County K-State Extension and approached a skeptical City Council about an arrangement to reopen the building. Fourteen months after the John Dewey group left, Community Pride started working to reclaim the building under an agreement with the city.
Treaster said the city paid the building’s insurance, mowed the lawn and contributed to maintenance cost, but Lecompton Community Pride was responsible for day-to-day operational expenses associated with the many functions now offered, Treaster said.
“We pay all the utilities,” she said. It has a summer children’s reading program but is also popular with adults checking out movies, using two desktop computers or connecting their own devices to available Wi-Fi, she said.
The meeting room with its adjacent kitchen has become much in demand, and is home to the annual Lecompton High School reunions.
Those rooms might have been the priorities, but the biggest financial commitment was made in rehabilitating the school’s old theater, Treaster said.
“The first big thing was buying new curtains for the plastic ones we found in here,” she said of the dark red curtains now covering the windows that line the theater’s exterior wall. The dance classes are popular with Lecompton girls and draw students from north of the Kansas River who do not want to travel all the way to Lawrence for classes or prefer the more relaxed atmosphere of the local instruction, Treaster said.
Other activity rooms include a large space for a local sewing circle, a Lecompton United Methodist Church free clothes shop and lounge where residents meet for weekly morning teas.
As the list of activities offered in the school indicate, the building is once again woven into the daily life of the community and a place where younger generations of Lecompton residents will make their own memories, Treaster said.
