Phthursday Musings: They Tore Down Our Grade School

I was going to skip this week, having been out of town for much of it, and being bombed with work, but I stumbled onto something tonight which I simply had to write something about.

THEY TORE DOWN OUR GRADE SCHOOL.

I was sent this article about the revitalization of the long abandoned Barber Colman factory site just off the river in the southwest part of Rockford. My dad having worked at Barber Colman (the Loves Park facility) for a long time, my interest was piqued. I remembered about where the older facility was but I couldn’t quite imagine anyone pumping $430,000,000 into it. I brought it up on Google Maps and thought, yeah, that’s where I thought it was, and hey, isn’t that just like three blocks from my grade school?

OH NO IT’S NOT, because in 2019 THEY TORE DOWN OUR GRADE SCHOOL.

Literally they tore the school down three and a half years ago and I had no idea. The site is now just a square block of grass:

It’s not just that they tore down a grade school, mind you, they tore down Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School!

You can tell from the photo that this wasn’t that terribly old of a building. I can’t speak to what shape it was in or anything like that but… wow. Wow. Wowowowow.

In the Facebook post where I found that they’d torn it down I saw somebody had made a comment to my former principal. Is Mr. Wixom still around? Yes. He is. And according to LinkedIn, since retiring from Rockford Public Schools, he’s been with the Rockford Park District in, and I swear I am not making this up, Goose management.

I went to King for grades 3-6 (minus the weird three months or so of 4th grade when I was in Colorado). I’d gone to Beyer for K-2. The gifted program in Rockford at that time was split between Beyer (very close to where I lived) and King (not really close to where any of us lived). King was on the southwest side and most of the kids in the neighborhood classes were either Black or Mexican. Exactly zero of the kids in the gifted program when I was in 6th grade were Black or Mexican. I have so many complicated thoughts about all that but I’ll just leave it out there for you all to form your own.

I could rattle off a whole bunch of things about going to King, including how we had an annual concert where we sang songs about Martin Luther King Jr. (it’s true) or how we had a chess club (the King Kongs) or any number of other things but for now I’m just dumbfounded they tore the place down. And honestly even more dumbfounded that someone is putting hundreds of millions of dollars into a redevelopment project blocks away.

And, um, Goose management?

This, I think, is the shortest Phthursday Musings ever written, but truly, tonight, I am so perplexed and feel so disconnected that I am at a loss for any more words.