Situated on the Union Pacific Railway, 11 miles northeast of Pine Bluff, sits the small town of Altheimer where residents say "their community has lost its light." What began over a decade ago still brings sadness to the community: school consolidation.
Altheimer-Sherrill High School and Altheimer Middle School closed in 2007. Both schools had declining enrollments and financial woes. Those schools consolidated into the Dollarway School District in Pine Bluff. The last school to close its doors was Altheimer-Martin Elementary School, in the spring of 2013, and according to Pastor Glenn Barnes, an Altheimer native, consolidation "killed the town."
Barnes, a resident of Pine Bluff, serves on the Pine Bluff schools consolidation committee, which recently hosted a community meeting to present data and options to consolidate Dollarway, Watson Chapel, and Pine Bluff high schools.
Barnes said for his hometown, the consolidation wasn't in the best interest of the community.
"When you take the school, you kill the city, and so what's left is just the people who couldn't move out and go," he said.
Driving through Altheimer, the once lively little town now resembles a ghost town with boarded-up businesses and abandoned school buildings. Nikita Lowe, a resident of White Hall from Altheimer, gets emotional thinking about how consolidation disrupted her high school years.
[Video not showing up above? Click here to view » https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3J9Hop7L04]
Lowe described it as a "confusing time" and a "traumatic experience" for her, her sisters, and cousins.
"When you grow up with everybody and you've always dreamed about graduating from Altheimer and then you never get that-- that's sad for me to even talk about," said Lowe, who is now 30 years old with children in the White Hall School District.
"It was a sad situation for me. They could have let our kids stay down here and tried to manage both of the schools," said Kimberly Bryant who was a cafeteria worker at Altheimer-Sherrill High School. "Some kids were young. They didn't know anything about breaking up schools and going to another school."
Bryant said a community school made it convenient for parents who didn't have transportation, but the forced consolidation made it hard. "If something went wrong, you got to jump up and go over there. If you don't have transportation, you have to find somebody to take you to get your kids," she said. "It was a problem, a big problem but the way they saw it, we didn't have enough kids to keep us open."
According to publicschoolreview.com, Altheimer-Sherrill High School served 137 students in grades 9-12 the year it closed.
The student-teacher ratio of 10:1 was lower than the Arkansas state level of 14:1.
Altheimer Middle School served 102 students in grades 6-8 the year it closed.
The student-teacher ratio of 17:1 was higher than the Arkansas state level of 14:1.
Altheimer-Martin Elementary School had 78 students when it closed.
Back then each enrolled child represented $6,267 in state revenue to the school district. Now the state provides approximately $6,800-per-child according to information on the state Education Department website.
Jami Walton, a 2007 graduate, says she will never forget her senior year. Forced to go to Dollarway, she said she hated it.
"It was devastating," said Walton. "You had to go somewhere else your senior year with people you didn't know to graduate. I didn't like it."
Walton said bus riders had to go to Dollarway but a lot of her classmates ended up going to other schools.
"Some people went to [Watson] Chapel, some people went to England, White Hall, it split everybody up my senior year," she said. "A lot of people moved to Pine Bluff just to get closer to the schools and for jobs."
With the possible consolidation of the Pine Bluff schools, Walton believes a lot of her classmates who moved to Pine Bluff will be affected again, this time as parents.
Lowe and her family chose to go to a different school when Altheimer schools closed down. Selecting White Hall as their school of choice, it still came with inconveniences from the commute to athletics.
"We drove back and forth because the buses only went to Dollarway, "said Lowe. "It was a 25-mile commute. My mom worked at Tyson's Chicken and had to be at work at five in the morning so my aunt would pick us up and take us to school."
That aunt was Gloria Lewis, a current Dollarway School District custodian who worked at Altheimer-Martin Elementary School.
"We stayed in Altheimer about four years after they transferred the high school and the middle school," she said. "I was also transporting my nieces and nephews to White Hall."
Lewis said the consolidation took a mental toll on the students, especially the athletes who were now attending a rival school and trying to make the team.
"I'm still in contact with some of the kids, and they still talk about how depressed they were because when they came to Dollarway they were not allowed to play sports the way they were in Altheimer," said Lewis, who said many dealt with bullying, jealousy and fights. "A lot of the students, no matter how good they were, weren't picked and if they were on a team they weren't allowed to play," she said.
Lowe ended up making the girls basketball team at White Hall but the game experience was not the same. "There's no place like home," said Lowe who only had a handful of support at her games. "In Altheimer, the stands would have been full of community support. It's different when everybody knows your name."
With schools being the focal point of a community, what happens when they no longer exist?
For the city of Altheimer, it was a domino effect of suffering. Business revenue began to decline, and and some eventually had to close down. The population began to dwindle as families uprooted and left for neighboring cities.
"The community is dead now, but that's not how it used to be before they closed down our schools," said Lowe, who goes to her hometown to visit her mom. "When schools were open it was different. Stores were open and homecoming was like a UAPB homecoming."
When a school is removed from its community, the loss of a community is sure to follow, according to Barnes, who spoke from experience. As far as Pine Bluff is concerned, Barnes said there are various ways to consolidate and still save a community.
"You don't have to build one school in the consolidation. You can leave everybody where they are and interchange teachers and save money," said Barnes. "If they move it to one place, it will kill that area. All those stores that are around that school now will die."
Calling his hometown a ghost town, Barnes said communities are started around a school, and moving a school means you are taking the light from the community.
"We lost a lot of stores and we are just not productive anymore," said Lewis. "Losing our schools was like losing a loved one. It's something you know you will never get back, leaving a hole in your heart."