Making 100

Women’s basketball has changed significantly over the years.

There have been rule changes, the number of players on the floor at one time and their roles and after five-on-five became established, the sport has revolutionized in its athletic ability.

Gamesmanship has gone up considerably. When girls basketball went to rovers in the fall of 1970 in Georgia high school ball, there were many mentions of how exactly this would work out. Many coaches felt they only had one or two players capable of playing both ends of the floor (two rovers crossed the center line). Rovers went out in 1975. Today, of course, all teams have five players who have to go end to end.

Quality of play is better, but there is something missing from the era of forwards on one end and guards on the other: crazy stats.

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A collection of animal stories

Random animal stories have lit up newspapers for centuries.

We read them for for a few reasons. We’re inspired by the loyalty of a pet, a constant companion, beacon of love. Even the old Unsolved Mysteries program aired a story of a heroic pig that squeezed through a dog door and laid down in the street to call attention to an ill master. We love animals whose intelligence is more akin to ours. Dogs capable of intricate tricks. Gorillas using sign language. And we have a love/repulsion about  – though usually at more of a distance – tales of animals getting one over on humans, be it grizzly attacks, hungry Florida wildlife or an abused animal finally having enough.

James Herriot captured the world with animal stories, starting with All Creatures Great and Small, which was later turned into a television series.

With other story work underway, the summer hiatus of the Georgia High School Basketball Project blog is ending gently here, with a few unrelated, utterly tossed together vintage animal stories out of newspapers.

Summer hiatus

This blog will be taking a break for a few weeks.

Some fresh material needs additional research for blog entries.

Plus, there are plenty of updates that need to be done to the GHSBP main basketball site. Besides 2018 scores, a few other bits are being worked on.

Breaking up was hard to do in Camden (Part III)

A consolidated Camden County High had formed in Woodbine in 1945. A year later, the experiment was over.

Thanks to an increased presence on the Camden board of education by members from Kingsland and St. Marys and some unsigned board minutes and an unlikely quorum, Camden was split. Kingsland and St. Marys split off into their own consolidated high school, South Camden, while Woodbine retained the Camden County name.

And then everyone lived peacefully … for 2.5 years.

Breaking up was hard to do in Camden (Part II)

In September 1945, the three high schools of Camden County – North Camden, St. Marys and Kingsland – came together as a single high school.

The idea of one high school sounded good to school officials because all three had been plagued with small attendance and in the case of St. Marys, no real building because of a 1943 fire. Better course offerings were seen at Camden County High, which was located at Woodbine in a building that had been housing elementary students.

Almost immediately, St. Marys and Kingsland began to believe they had made a terrible mistake.

Breaking up was hard to do in Camden (Part I)

This will be a tale in multiple parts.

The point of school consolidations is to bring schools together. To combine resources, perhaps to lose an outmoded building with a declining student population.

Consolidations usually take.

Lowndes County High opened in 1959, joining together Clyattville, Lake Park, Naylor and part of Pine Grove. In 1966, it consolidated further with the addition of Hahira. Lowndes has flirted with a new high school, but has held fast for more than 50 years.

North Habersham and South Habersham combined in 1970. They are seemingly contently wedded to one another.

Not all consolidations take. Duluth and Norcross were joined for a single school year, 1957-58 as West Gwinnett, before Duluth demanded to be set free. Greene-Taliaferro, Mitchell-Baker and Tri-County all joined and split.

Those decisions are generally final. Authorities involved realized that one situation or the other was best for their student populations.

But in one county school system, that wasn’t it. They were together, then they were not. Then they were together again.

This is Camden County.

Camden is the only known county school system in Georgia to have consolidated, broken up, then consolidated again.

Proposed high school football teams

In 2016, 419 of 458 schools in the Georgia High School Association played football, including 91 of the 121 in Class A, the league’s smallest. That’s a far cry from 1960, when in Class C – then the GHSA’s tiniest – 33 of  the 135 schools hit the gridiron.

Everyone had to start somewhere.

Some stats on the decline of one-teacher schools

 

 

One of the most iconic images of historic American education is that of the country schoolhouse. A one-room fixture, it represented education and it represented communities.

One-room schools are rare these days. Florida closed its last one, Duette Elementary, in 2016. Minnesota still has one, Angle Inlet, located in a section of the state only accessible by roads in Canada.

Georgia, generally being easily accessible and communities located close enough to towns of some size, began weeding theirs out as soon as possible. By 1960, they were all but extinct.

Miller County was once a large high school

Miller County is the epitome of a Class A public school in the Georgia High School Association.

The sole high school in a county whose population the United States census estimates at a hair under 6,000 in 2016, Miller personifies rural Georgia. A quick scan of the city via Google Maps shows all the staples – a Hardee’s and a Dollar General.

A list: The 1950s and State School Building Authority

Burgess Landrum, now known as Jenkins County Elementary, was built in Millen under the State School Building Authority. It opened in 1956.

This is a list, as best is currently researched, as to what was built during the 1950s by the State School Building Authority.

The list is a complicated one. Some locally funded building projects are included, but only if they were built at the same time as the rest of the State School Building Authority projects. That means that Eastside Elementary, which opened in 1951 in Lumpkin County, is not credited as Lumpkin County’s building program completed in 1957.  Lavonia’s black elementary is included as it was part of the larger Franklin County program.

Schools with an asterisk are buildings that were proposed, but unproven as to whether they actually went up.

Not all systems have been researched, or in the case of some, such as Bryan County, information about the building program has not been found.

NEW SCHOOLS OR MAJOR ADDITIONS