Freeport Area School District's historic schoolhouse may see new life as preschool
An 1850s school building in Buffalo Township that's used primarily for storage could soon have preschoolers learning ABCs in its two rooms.
The Kelly School, a brick building that sits adjacent to Freeport Area School District's Buffalo Elementary School along Sarver Road, was last used for kindergarten classes 15 years ago.
The school board voted Wednesday to approve spending as much as $5,000 for architectural design services in order to secure an occupancy permit for the building.
Superintendent Ian Magness said the district is hoping to use the building for a pre-K program as early as the beginning of the 2017-18 school year. He said he sees the future program as a tool to provide students with a smoother transition to the district's K-12 classes.
“We also see the value in providing our parents with yet another option for high-quality early education programming that our growing community is demanding,” Magness said.
Magness isn't sure whether the school district will run the preschool or whether it will partner with another organization.
A history of education
The school was named after a couple — David and Mary Jane Kelly — who sold an acre of land on which it was built in 1854 to the Buffalo District School Directors for $1.
The transaction kicked off more than 150 years of on-and-off education in the building, which was initially a one-room school. By 1904, the student population grew large enough to require the construction of a second room.
The school was closed in 1937 when the federal Public Works Administration built Buffalo Consolidated Elementary School. But overcrowding at the new elementary school in the 1940s caused officials to reopen the Kelly School for first-grade classes.
Albert “Ouch” Roenigk, a Buffalo Township supervisor and the township's unofficial historian, said his four brothers, sister and father attended the school and had Roberta Shields as their first-grade teacher.
Terry Berbigler, who worked at Buffalo Elementary School as a custodian for 42 years until he retired in 2011, attended first grade in the Kelly building in 1955. He said his classroom controlled a small bell tower above — and his work as custodian brought back memories.
As a custodian, he visited his former first-grade classroom nearly every day to perform light cleaning or maintenance. He couldn't resist ringing that bell.
“Everybody always said they could tell when I was in the Kelly School building,” Berbigler said. “I loved the sound of that bell.”
Berbigler said the township's kindergarten moved from Zion United Methodist Church on Bear Creek Road to the Kelly School for the 1969-70 school year.
Kindergarten classes briefly moved to the newly renovated Buffalo Elementary School after the 2000-01 school year before moving to the now-closed Kindergarten Center in Freeport.
School history preserved
A history of the building, its teachers and uses, is preserved in a binder in the Freeport Area School District's administration building.
Adding to it became a pet project of Deanna Sanner, who said she first noticed the building's stone foundation when her children were playing on the nearby playground in the early 1970s.
Sanner, 71, who now lives in Arizona, worked as a registered nurse while living in Buffalo Township. She began researching the history of the school, where her husband attended first grade in 1950 and where her son, Shawn, and daughter, Heather, went to kindergarten in the '70s.
She conducted oral histories, interviewed former Kelly School teachers and parsed through old Freeport Journal newspaper articles, from the 1870s to the 1950s, on microfilm at the Freeport Area Library to piece together the school's history.
Sanner took on the research because she worried the Kelly School's stories would be lost if not preserved in one place.
Kelly teacher/Union soldier
Sanner found newspaper articles that told the story of Matthew Greer. Greer was the school's lone teacher in 1867 and '68. He was a Civil War veteran who had been captured and spent several months imprisoned at Andersonville, Ga.
Greer became ill at the notorious Confederate prison. Greer's neighbor, friend and fellow Union soldier, Michael Kelly, was there, too.
Kelly was set to be released in a prisoner exchange. But Kelly told Greer to take his place. The swap allowed the freed Greer to soon return to health.
Berbigler said the Kelly School's roof has been renovated and a few wooden supports for the bell have been replaced.
Magness said the district has continued to heat and renovate the building for preservation purposes but utilizes it mainly for storage.
“I think it's great,” Berbigler said. “It's too nice of a building to sit empty.”
Matthew Medsger contributed. Andrew Erickson is a Tribune-Review staff writer. Reach him at 724-226-4675 or aerickson@tribweb.com.
