Museum educator Cheryl Lane interacts with Giovanna Fusca, 5,
Claudia Chow and Isabella Fusca, 4 as they create cards
during the Schoolhouse Children’s Museum & Learning Center centennial celebration.
Tim Stepien/The Coastal Star
When Sandy McGregor saw this 1920s photo, she spotted her uncle, Jack Lacey (second row,
third from the left), but didn’t immediately recognize the tall girl next to him —
her mother, Ruth Lacey, probably 14 at the time. Ruth Lacey became a teacher
in Boca Raton. Her sister, Hazel, taught math at the Boynton School during the years McGregor attended.
INSET LEFT BELOW: Sandy McGregor now
INSET RIGHT BELOW: McGregor in third grade
By Mary Thurwachter
If walls could talk, certainly the Boynton School, which celebrated its 100 birthday in September, would have a thing or two to say about the Lacey and McGregor families. Sandy McGregor’s mother, Ruth Lacey, and her six uncles and aunts were among the school’s earliest students. Later, Sandy McGregor and her sister, Marjorie Anne, and 12 cousins attended the school, as well.
“There was no air conditioning and the heat could be pretty brutal in there,” recalled McGregor, who still lives in Boynton Beach. “If you were on the west side of the building, the heat could make it miserable.”
The school closed in 1990 and became The Schoolhouse Children’s Museum & Learning Center in 2001.
Heat aside, most of McGregor’s elementary school remembrances are pleasant ones.
She met her first boyfriend, Mike Lang, there in third grade.
“He was drop-dead gorgeous,” she said. “My best friend Celia Scott (daughter of Lucille and Otley Scott of local restaurant fame) and I fought over him.”
The blue bicycle McGregor often rode to school had a basket big enough to hold the trumpet she played in band. But other students, including many from Briny Breezes and Ocean Ridge, arrived by bus.
Classrooms in the masonry vernacular school had large old-fashioned blackboards, and those who misbehaved were kept after school to clap erasers together to clear the chalk, she said.
McGregor, now 69, never had to do that.
“I never got into trouble and I never had to go to the principal’s office,” she said.
Her uncles, on the other hand, were known to be mischievous at times — like the Halloween night they climbed into the rooftop tower to ring the bell. She’s not sure what kind of punishment her grandmother doled out to the rascals.
The school, at 129 E. Ocean Ave., served kindergarten through 12th grade until a high school was built next door in 1927. For the next 30 years, the school was a traditional first- through eighth-grade elementary school, until Boynton Junior High School opened in 1958.
Janet DeVries, president of the Boynton Beach Historical Society, and Ginger Pedersen, first vice president, have done extensive research on the old school. They said that between 1900 and 1910, Boynton grew from fewer than 100 to 700 in population.
DeVries said that a two-room schoolhouse was built in 1904 near the now 100-year-old school.
“A make-shift school for African-Americans, known at that time as ‘The Colored School,’ opened in 1896 in the area of today’s Poinciana School,” DeVries said.
The larger Boynton School was designed by Baltimore architect William W. Maughlin, who also designed Palm Beach High School. The two-story, six-classroom building, one of the first in Boynton to have indoor plumbing, had a signature portico, large sash windows and transoms to promote the flow of fresh air and sunlight.
Eighty-one students attended the school when it opened in 1913. There were three teachers and a principal named Howard Frederick Pfahl, who came to school on an Indian motorcycle, DeVries said.
By 1990, the school district no longer needed the school and ownership went to the city.
That’s when several local people, including members of the Boynton Beach Historical Society, worked to turn the old school into its current incarnation as the Schoolhouse Children’s Museum & Learning Center. Among the museum’s earliest supporters were Marie Shepard, Harvey Oyer, Alice, Curtis and C. Stanley Weaver, Barbara Traylor, Ken Kaleel, Carrie Parker Hill, Arleen Dennison, Voncile Smith and Virginia Farace.
The Schoolhouse Children’s Museum currently has 400 members, mostly families and a lot of grandparents.
“Now we have this interactive museum where kids can turn knobs, press buttons and ring bells,” said Judith Klinek, the museum’s executive director. “We always keep history in mind,” Klinek said. “We’re not just pretty and playful.
“In 1913, Boynton was a farming community, and the railroad played an important part in the community,” she said. So the museum has interactive exhibits that feature a dairy farm and an orange-packing company, as well as a railroad ticket station.
In honor of the school’s centennial, the museum had two celebrations — a by-invitation-only reception for alumni and special supporters and friends of the school on Sept. 20, and a birthday party for kids at the museum complete with cards and cake on Sept. 28.
McGregor visited the museum recently with several of her cousins, all alumni of the Boynton School. While there, a museum staff member showed them several posters of old school photos.
“I noticed Uncle Jack in the middle of one of them,” McGregor said.
Her cousin pointed out a face next to her uncle that McGregor somehow overlooked.
“There was my mother right next to Uncle Jack,” McGregor said. “I’d never seen a picture of my mother at 14 before!”
The Schoolhouse Children’s Museum & Learning Center at 129 E. Ocean Ave. in downtown Boynton Beach is open from from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $4 for children ages 1-17, $4.50 for seniors, and $5 for adults. Members and children under 1 are free. For more information, call 742-6780 or see www.schoolhousemuseum.org
An early picture of the Boynton School. It was designed by Baltimore architect William W. Maughlin.
The two-story, six-classroom building, one of the first in Boynton to have indoor plumbing, had
a signature portico, large sash windows and transoms to promote the flow of fresh air and sunlight.
BELOW: Boynton School’s first principal, Howard Frederick Pfahl, came to school on a motorcyle.
Photos courtesy of the Boynton Beach Historical Society
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