Library of Congress photo


You’ve come a long way, baby West Valley school districts see big changes over last decade


he West Valley’s educational history is rife with stories about schools for sale and pioneering desegregation rulings. Probably the most intriguing tale from the area is the stolen schoolhouse saga, which was a battle between the Arlington and Palo Verde elementary districts. In 1896, a shared building called Powers Butte School sat on


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the west side of the Hassayampa River, even though more pupils lived on the east side. In the middle of the night, Palo Verde farmers loaded the 14-foot-by-16-foot room onto a wagon and moved it fi ve miles to the corner of Palo Verde Road and Highway 80, where the building stood for several years. Verlyne Meck, 71, longtime instructor for the Buckeye Union


High School District, wrote about the event and other historical highlights in her book, Buckeye. “I heard that story and got information, and there are pictures of it and different things,” she said. “It’s the truth; it’s not a legend.” Days of Little House on the Prairie one-room schoolhouses


are long gone, but it wasn’t too many years ago that plenty of districts still had only one school. The area’s 14 districts are all decades old, but many didn’t


years, from 1890 to 2003. Enrollment more than quadrupled in the last decade, causing it to need six campuses. According to records, the Pendergast Elementary District was the fi rst to be established in the West Valley in 1886. The original wood school building burned down in 1900, and the Pendergast family donated land for a new two-room brick build- ing that still stands, Superintendent Ron Richards said. The oldest school structure in Arizona still in use on its origi- nal site is in the Liberty Elementary District in Buckeye. The Cottonwood Log School was built in 1887 and later restored in 1993.


V8 The Buckeye Elementary District had just one site for 113


start to see major growth until the year 2000. In the last 12 years, the number of schools in the West Valley went from 24 to 67.


Children of migratory laborers living at a labor camp board a school bus in Avondale in a 1940 photograph. Many things have changed in the 72 years since this photo was taken, namely all the labor camps have long-since disappeared.


grade. “I’m proud, but it does make me an antique. I like to use the


Meck attended school in the historical building during fi rst


word, ‘vintage,’” she said. “I really enjoyed my years at Liberty School. I felt like I got a very good education.” In Litchfi eld Park, the fi rst school was started in 1917 in an old cook shack with wooden fl oors and canvas side fl aps. Eleven pupils were enrolled in the beginning, but it increased daily and had 80 children by the following year. Mable Padgett was the district’s fi rst teacher, and she was honored in 2010 when the district named a school after her. To the southwest, the Tolleson Union High School District was organized on Jan. 24, 1914, but the fi rst class of students didn’t start until 1920 in a small wooden building divided into two classrooms and a small offi ce inside Pendergast Elemen- tary. Students could only attend the fi rst two years of high school in the district and then had to transfer to either Glendale Union High School or Phoenix Union High School. About 1972, Juan de Baustista DeAnza High School was built at the corner of 91st and Campbell avenues as a ninth- and 10th-grade high school, and Tolleson became the site for 11th- and 12th-graders. In 1981, DeAnza was sold to the Pendergast Elementary Dis- trict, which took special legislation. It was the only time in the United States that a school was sold to another district, Tolleson spokeswoman Karyn Eubanks said. The Tolleson Elementary District boasts the fi rst desegrega- tion case in the state. Before 1951, its white and Hispanic pupils attended class separately.


100 Vista — West Valley View, Avondale, Arizona years


See EDUCATION on V10 Spring/Summer 2012


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