JOPLIN, Mo. — For Galen McKinley, the connection to Joplin High School runs deep.

His class was the first to go all three years — 10th through 12th grades at the time — after the new high school was built on Indiana Avenue. He graduated in 1961.

His daughter, Ashley Micklethwaite, is the current school board president, and his grandson received his diploma on May 22, 2011, making him among the last to graduate from that school building.

“There’s some irony there,” McKinley said. “We’re kind of bookends.”

McKinley taught biology at JHS starting in 1965. When the district split into two high schools, he taught at Memorial until the schools reconsolidated in 1985, and he taught at JHS until his retirement in 1996. McKinley and his classmates celebrated their 50-year reunion in September. He’s optimistic about the future of JHS, and not just the building.

“I learned that a high school is not a building,” he said. “It was the building that had a great community of students and teachers through all the years it stood. The building will be gone, but the high school community will continue.”

When you go to a high school and then teach for 30 years, you see a lot of things, “some funny and some anything but funny,” he said.

McKinley recounted memories from throughout the years, including a classmate riding a motorcycle through the halls of JHS; a student watching from inside the school as his bicycle was stolen by a man who used it to go buy cigarettes at a mom and pop store down the road; a tornado hitting the school years ago and blowing out a wall of the gym; and, during summer school one year, an accident killing one or two people when flammable materials exploded in what was then the ROTC rifle room.

He also remembers the student success stories over the decades: the bright young girl who told him she was no good at science but went on to become a science teacher; the boy with a terrible home life who was about to drop out but got a scholarship to college and became a civil engineer; the girl in the 1970s who overdosed on drugs, dropped out and later became a nurse.

“In a lot of ways, I think it’s the most fantastic career a person could have,” McKinley said. “It took me a while to realize I was not a biology teacher, but a teacher of adolescence. Part of my job was to pull them kicking and screaming into adulthood. It was a really fun time.”

He said it’s hard to describe how he felt when he learned that the building had been destroyed by the May 22 tornado. But it was the security footage from inside the school that really stayed in his mind.

“It’s hard to imagine,” he said. “The initial reaction is disbelief. Then, it’s ‘what if?’ We used to have graduation at the high school. What if graduation had happened at the high school or (the tornado had hit) on a school day? We’re lucky graduation wasn’t there and it wasn’t on a school day.”



DEMOLITION

The stage is set for the demolition of JHS once crews finish pumping water from the basement and complete asbestos removal, which could be by the end of the week or early next week, school officials say.

After JHS and Franklin Technology Center were destroyed on May 22, the district established temporary schools for high school students, with juniors and seniors attending class at the converted Shopko campus at Northpark Mall, and freshmen and sophomores attending class at the Memorial campus.

School officials hope to break ground for all sites in May and plan to have the new high school, which will be combined with Franklin Technology Center, completed by August 2014. But, before they can break ground, residents will vote in April on a $62 million bond issue for the rebuilding of schools, the addition of safe rooms, and two new combined elementary schools.

The company hired to complete the demolition work is Urban Metro Development of Atlanta, Ga. The company was awarded the contract by the school board in October for $155,322. The same company was hired to demolish the old South Middle School for $134,230 and Irving Elementary for $139,260.



SCHOOL HISTORY

The Joplin school system has been in place since 1872, a year before the city of Joplin was officially incorporated, said Brad Belk, executive director of the Joplin Museum Complex.

Globe records from 1896 say there were 2,626 students and 62 teachers in the district that year, with some teachers having classes of more than 70 students. The district now has nearly 7,500 students, about 650 teachers and more than 1,000 employees total.

The 11 ward schools in the system in 1896 were Alcott, Byers Avenue, Byersville, Central (originally built in 1877 and located at Eighth Street and Wall Avenue), Columbia, East Joplin, Franklin, Jackson Avenue, Lincoln, Parr Hill and Perkins. The first recorded location in Globe records for the high school was at the old Jackson School site at Fourth Street and Jackson Avenue.

A new high school building was completed in January 1897 at the southeast corner of Fourth Street and Byers Avenue. The building later housed North Junior High School, a federal agency during the Depression, and then was the first building housing Joplin Junior College, according to Globe records. The junior college was a forerunner to Missouri Southern State University, Belk said.

Globe records from the early 1900s say the high school’s mascot was an eagle.

In 1915, voters approved a bond issue to build a new high school at Eighth Street and Wall Avenue (now the Memorial campus, which houses ninth- and 10th-graders) to relieve overcrowding at the old school. Voters agreed to spend $300,000 on a new high school and $50,000 to repair elementary schools.

The cornerstone for the new high school was installed in 1917. Placed inside the stone was a roster of the school board, faculty, students and school organizations, along with school publications and daily newspapers. During the ceremony, the stone was “anointed with wine, oil and corn, the Masonic symbols of happiness, peace and plenty,” according to Globe records.

“The building, constructed principally of brick, with its many windows, a high foundation of Carthage stone and trimmed with terra cotta, presents a pleasing outward appearance, but the passerby would hardly imagine that the building houses a so thoroughly modern school plan as the new Joplin school structure really is,” the Globe reported.

Joplin High School stayed at that location until a new building was erected in 1958 at 2401 S. Indiana Ave. through a $2 million bond issue. The building was intended to house 2,000 students.

In 1968, the district decided to split Joplin High School into two high schools, Parkwood and Memorial, because of an increase in enrollment attributed to the baby boomer generation, Belk said. Parkwood stayed at the location on Indiana Avenue, and Memorial was at Eighth Street and Wall Avenue.

The two schools recombined as Joplin High School in 1985 at the Indiana Avenue campus.