Buildings become outdated and wear out and are repaired, renovated and occasionally replaced. Even school buildings succumb to Father Time at some point.
In Pine Bluff, the old high school is coming down to be replaced by a new one. The groundbreaking for the replacement campus was held on Wednesday, with the ribbon cutting scheduled for about the same month and day in 2026.
There are plenty of mixed emotions associated with a school building coming down. A group tried unsuccessfully to keep some of the Southeast Middle School in existence, for instance, but lost out to plans to build low-income housing on the site.
No formal group came forward in an effort to keep a vestige of Pine Bluff High School intact, but the word “bittersweet” was used often to describe the feeling that many had when considering their old school where they came of age, made lifelong friends, learned from and were inspired by dedicated teachers, got an idea of what they wanted to be when they grew up, maybe fell in love for the first time — in short, where they spent their formative years. To see the dismantling of the bricks and mortar that created the space for all of that is painful on many levels.
And of course, there is the excitement over the prospect for a new high school. The one being torn down last had an overhaul back in the 1970s. What patrons and students expect from a high school experience has changed much since those days. This new facility will have many of the bells and whistles that these expectations demand. Who doesn’t like a new car smell?
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
In many communities, those two sides of the coin would cover most of the emotional terrain associated with the building of a new school. In Pine Bluff, however, there is a third element — that the sum total of this new school campus will exceed its various parts, that the community is riding on this being one of the key pushes it needs to regain its footing, that Pine Bluff needs a significant up arrow amidst lots of down ones.
For many years, the city has been losing population. That exodus has pulled hundreds and hundreds of students out of the Pine Bluff School District. As the classroom numbers left, so did hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
One administrator said that trying to figure out how many teachers and classrooms were needed for the next year was like shooting a moving target. If you missed, desperately needed money was wasted.
The Dollarway School District got to that abyss first and was taken over by the state. Then Pine Bluff followed suit. Eventually, Dollarway was folded in with Pine Bluff. Slowly but surely, Pine Bluff has been moving away from that trauma and toward something better.
The line in the sand became the millage vote. There was some angst about where the state wanted to take the Pine Bluff School District, but voters threw the lever for the millage in a big way, and with that money there will be a new tomorrow for the Pine Bluff School District. Perhaps, as it is hoped, it will be a new tomorrow for the entire community.