Alumni bid farewell to old Wheatley building

Mixed emotions flooded over the faithful gathered Saturday outside the 85-year-old Fifth Ward building that once housed Wheatley High School and E.O. Smith Junior High.

Alumni got a chance to salute their schools one last time before the Houston Independent School District demolishes the building to make way for a new campus for the Young Men's College Preparatory Academy.

"I was just really floored when they announced that all the board members had voted to demolish this school," said Paula Ransom Franklin, a 78-year-old alumna of E.O Smith Junior High. "I thought about all the days that I walked through this school. There's so much history here. I just hate to see the history demolished. There are spirits on this campus that will never be deleted."

On Thursday, the HISD school board settled a lawsuit with alumni and Fifth Ward leaders to demolish the school and build a new school in its place, using old bricks and materials from the original building.

The project would cost the district another $1 million to complete, but the new school would have some of the same architectural designs as did the historic building.

'Deeply rooted'

Franklin, who attended E.O. Smith when she was just 11 years old, said she thinks politics played a major role in deciding the future of the school.

"I believe that the representatives did not do what they could have done to help us," she said. "I feel that they did not have the connection that we have to this school."

Charles Cook, who went to E.O. Smith in 1970, said that his family has strong ties to the building going all the way back to the early 1930s. He said that it is a tragedy that the school will be demolished.

"I was following a family legacy by attending here," he said. "My family tree is here. My father, my mother, aunts, uncles ... Wheatley Knights runs deep... Purple runs deep in my blood. We're deeply rooted in Phillis Wheatley."

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Alumni bid farewell to old Wheatley building